Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  The half-human coughed and his snug wrinkled and crawled in obscene patches, revealing yet more leather. “Not many people let to see me,” Kammer said. “Why do you?”

  “I come from Genji,” Philby said, “with a message from the Irdizu to the Chujoan shamans.”

  “Ah, Christ,” Kammer said roughly and spat a thin stream of green and red saliva on the rocky ground between them. “Pardon. No offense. I still hate the … taste. Keeps me alive, I think, my human thoughts think, but tastes like essence of crap profane.”

  “You know about the God the Physicist crew?” Philby asked.

  “Bloody *criaock* and *oonshlr#hack*.”

  The translator could not work with his humanized pronunciation; little was known of Chujoan language anyway, the Masters being so spare with their communications. Philby jotted the words on his notepad in the Chujoan phonetic devised by the Japanese, who had dropped transmitters into the villages four years before Philby’s ship arrived in the Murasaki system. The Chujoans had tolerated the transmitters, and what few phrases they uttered had been fed into their All Nihon shipboard supercomputers. The Japanese had been kind enough to share their knowledge with Philby.

  They knew Philby would be useful. He was, after all, rational—unlike the God the Physicists.

  “I’ve come to talk about Carnot,” Philby said. Kammer said nothing, leaning on his thick, snug-encrusted stick. “He’s using your name. Claims to have been blessed by you. He’s spreading a religion, if you can call it that, around the Irdizu villages—”

  “I know little about the Irdizu,” Kammer said, voice cracking. “Do them seldom. Not been there.” The leathery face seemed to half-smile.

  “He claims to have met with you, talked about his version of Jesus with you. He says you have seen visions of Chujo and Genji united under the rule of Jesus, who will come to these planets when the time is right.”

  “We didn’t talk much, doing the first,” Kammer said.

  Philby tried to understand what he meant, and decided to let context be his guide. The notepad was recording all sound—perhaps meaning could be extracted later.

  “Doing the second, he was already ill. Could see that.”

  “You met with him twice?” Philby asked.

  Kammer nodded. “Sick the second time. He was doing the wind.”

  “He was ill with the plague,” Philby said, his skin crawling at the thought that Kammer had probably been the source of that plague.

  “He was doing the wind,” Kammer said. “Pardon me. He was almost dead. He was looking for signs. I did what I could.”

  “What was that?”

  Kammer shook his head and lifted his stick. “Doing the foulness. I hit him.” He brought the stick down on the ground with a sharp crack. Philby noticed there was snug on the stick as well. Some of the snug on the stick fell away in patches. “He got away before I could hit him again.”

  “Do you know where Carnot is hiding?” Philby asked, hoping that Kammer’s reversion to Chujoan had reflected a personal distaste.

  “Wonderful man,” Kammer said, hawking again—his entire chest patch of snug heaving like a sewage-befouled sea—but not spitting. “I don’t. Where he is. Who are you? Beg pardon. That means … What will you be doing here?”

  General clean-up. Triage. Sanitizing.

  “I’m here to interview the survivors of the wineskin plague,” Philby said, adjusting his hydrator. “And to find Carnot.”

  Kammer laughed. “Thinks I’m something.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

  “Risked doing martyr to the bullyboys. They dislike anything new. Do the thorn fence.” Kammer made a disgusting excretory sound in his throat and rasped, “Knew. Knew.”

  Philby glanced at the line of Chujoans standing mute, motionless, six human paces east of them, and the bullyboys—what the early explorers had called trolls—standing with mindless patience at the edge of the village waiting for some biochemical sign of his alienness, his undesirability.

  “He survived the plague,” Philby said offhandedly, as if conveying sad news.

  “Know that,” Kammer said. “Vector of the cultural disease.”

  “Yes,” Philby said, surprised that Kammer was so in tune with his own thoughts. “Then you agree with me, that he—that his people are a danger?”

  “You try to block him?”

  “Yes,” Philby said.

  “How?”

  “By going from village to village among the Irdizu, and telling them the truth. Not mystical nonsense.”

  Kammer smiled, his teeth a ruin encrusted with gray. “Doing the good. I mean, that’s good of you. What will you make of Carnot … doing with him when you find him?”

  “Make him stop polluting these worlds,” Philby said.

  “Ah. Doing us all a service.”

  “You tried to stop him as well, didn’t you? With your stick?”

  “He’s alive, isn’t he? You’d better go now,” Kammer said, turning his head and poking his raw-looking chin at their observers. “They’ll make you do martyr soon. Best pass on your message from Heaven and do a … be a trotter. Trot off. You’re beginning to bore them, you silly wretch.”

  “Do I bore you as well, Kammer?” Philby asked. He trusted the bullyboys would not detect or react to his human irritation.

  Kammer said nothing, the whited eyes with their pastel green irises minus pupils moving back and forth independently, like a lizard’s hunting for a flying insect.

  “No, old fellow,” Kammer said. “I’d really like to sit and do the speaking some more. But my skin tells me I’m not up to it. I always listen to my skin. Without it, I’m an indigestible memory.”

  Philby nodded, the gesture almost invisible behind his mask and hydrator. “Thank you, Mr. Kammer,” he said.

  Kammer had already turned and begun his limping retreat to the safety of the village. “Nothing, old folks,” Kammer said. Lurching on his beggar’s rearranged limbs, S-curved back hunched like a ridge of iron-rich mountains, without looking back Kammer added, “Hope you know what the Irdizy *fchix* are saying to these.” He waved a thin crooked hand at the shaman and his attendants.

  Philby didn’t. He had to take that risk.

  The shaman approached and without looking at him, as if direct eye contact was either unknown or an unspeakable breach, snatched the Irdizu package from Philby’s grasp and walked away, quietly erecting his genitalia and pissing all over the sacred himatid pelt wrapper.

  Philby, hair on his neck frizzing with fear of bullyboy teeth, walked away from the village to rejoin the transport crew on the cliff ledge a kilometer outside the village. The Japanese escort, an attractive middle-aged woman named Tatsumi, bowed deeply on his return. Sheldrake and Thompson, pilots from his own crew, stiffened perceptibly. They seemed surprised he had returned. He lifted his arms and they sprayed him down, just as a precaution. Our own pissing ceremony.

  Kammer’s spit had landed within a meter of his disposable boots.

  “He’s become the Old Man of the Mountain,” Philby said, doffing the boots, tossing them into the scrub and climbing into the transport. Tatsumi, Sheldrake and Thompson followed. “He knows what I’m here for. I think he approves.”

  They all listened to the notepad playback.

  Dream journey above the pastel land, dreary dry old Chujo, bleak waste of a world with a thin cloak of dry air and an illustrious past, if what the Japanese had witnessed years ago could be believed … No reason not to.

  Edward Philby, First Planetfall Coordinator of the multi-national starship Lorentz, who answered only to the Captain and First Manager, tried briefly to sleep but found himself staring over the mountains and once, briefly, a small pale green lake with ancient shores like lids around a diseased eye. We have come so far and suffered so much to be here.

  He could not avoid the crooked shape of Kammer in his thoughts, broken and mummified, smelling like an unwashed tramp and yet also like something else: flowers
. An odor of sanctity. Eyes like that lake.

  The God the Physicists had come here to find something transcendental, their ragged ship surviving the voyage just barely, their faith strengthened in the great Betweens, knowing they could not return if they could not find It here, and they had been lucky. They had found It, and then It had killed them as mercilessly as the unthinking void …

  The glory of Chujoan biology, the truly transcendental; that which takes a man and transforms him into a survivor and a symbol. Carnot had said: “He is resurrected. The old Kammer died, just as we thought. They resurrected him and imbued him with their spirit of Christ.” A dirty, ragged, smelly sort of Christ.

  Tatsumi saw that he was not asleep. “You are worried about the settlers on Genji,” she said. “Your countrymen.”

  “They’re not my countrymen,” Philby said. “I’m English. They’re bloody Southwesterners from the U.S.A.”

  “I beg your pardon.”

  “Easy mistake, we might as well be a state of the U.S.,” he said. “Europe won’t have us now. Or rather, then . . .” He waved a hand back behind him; time dilated by decades. He had not bothered to catch up on the thin messages from distant Sol, slender lifelines to farflung children.

  She smiled and nodded: Earth history, all past for her as well.

  “You believe they will do great damage,” she offered cautiously, as if Philby might be offended to have a Japanese commenting upon people at least of his language and broad culture if not his nation.

  “You know they will, Tatsumi-san,” he said. “Kammer knows they will. He says he tried to kill Carnot and failed.”

  Tatsumi pursed her lips and frowned. She did not appear shocked. Philby tapped his finger on the edge of the couch, waiting for her reaction. “Carnot thinks Kammer is a … Jesus?”

  “An avatar of the ancient spirituality of Chujo. Identical to Jesus. Jesus can be found in the universal ground state, where all our redemptions lie. God shows us the way through physics. Just what the Irdizu need—visitors from the sky able to carry messages to Heaven.”

  “So you take messages in his stead.”

  “They know I’m not a spirit. I’m a man of solid matter, not Physicist nonsense.”

  “And what will you do next?”

  “Talk to Carnot, if I can find him.”

  Tatsumi frowned again, shaking her head. “He is not on Chujo?”

  “I’ve been looking for him for the past three weeks.”

  “Then he must be on Genji. If he is there, I can find out where he is, and take you to him.”

  Philby hid his surprise. “I thought your people wanted to stay out of this.”

  “We thought all the cultists would die,” Tatsumi said. “They did not.”

  “Pardon my inquisitiveness—”

  “Your inquisition?” Tatsumi interrupted with a faint smile. He returned her smile, but with slitted eyes and an ironic nod.

  “Believe me, I represent no religious authority on Earth.”

  “Of course not,” Tatsumi said.

  “I’m wondering just what your position is on these settlers.”

  “Earth will keep sending them,” Tatsumi said sadly. “There is nothing we can do. Dialog takes decades. The nations of Earth have made the Murasaki system into a symbol of … manliness? National prestige? We cannot fight such a thing.”

  “There are two more ships on the way,” Philby said.

  Tatsumi nodded. “We hope they are as enlightened as your own expedition.”

  Irony? “Thank you,” he said.

  “But since dialog is so difficult, we wonder from whence you derive your authority. You represent no church, and any government is too far away to instruct you. Who gives you orders to quell the God the Physicists?”

  Philby shook his head. “Nobody outside of the Murasaki system.”

  “Then you perform your duty autonomously?”

  “Yes.”

  “Self-appointed.”

  He flinched and his face reddened. “Your people should remember the effect of a cultural plague. The nineteenth century … Admiral Perry?”

  “Nobody forces the Irdizu to accept our commercial products. There are none yet to force upon them. And the West came to Nihon before Perry. We had Christians in our midst for centuries before Perry. They were persecuted, tortured, murdered … yet fifty thousand still lived in Japan when Perry arrived.”

  “What Carnot wants to force upon the Irdizu could lead to war, death, destruction on a colossal scale.”

  “Carnot seems to want to re-establish the ancient links between Chujo and Genji,” Tatsumi said.

  Thompson, who had listened attentively and quietly in the seat behind Tatsumi, leaned forward. “We’re here to preserve Irdizu self-rule. Carnot is a kind of missionary. We can’t allow the kind of desecration of native cultures that happened on Earth.”

  “Oh, yes, that is true,” Tatsumi said. She appeared mildly flustered. “I do not wish to be flippant, Mr. Philby, Mr. Thompson.”

  “They’re out of their minds,” Philby said, grimacing. Listening to Thompson, though, he realized how much they sounded as if they were mouthing a party line, rehearsed across centuries; how much it sounded as if they might be the persecutors, the inquisitors, as Tatsumi had so pointedly punned. “They really are.”

  “A cultural plague,” Tatsumi said, attempting to mollify when in fact no umbrage had been taken.

  “Precisely,” Philby said. What Kammer said. Have the Japanese spoken to Kammer?

  Sheldrake had kept his silence, as always, a young man with a young face, born on the journey and accelerated to manhood, but still looking boyish.

  “What do you think, Mr. Sheldrake?” Tatsumi asked him.

  Sheldrake gave a sudden, sunny smile. “I’m enjoying the landscape,” he said in his pleasant tenor.

  “Please be open with us,” Tatsumi pursued, very uncharacteristically for a Japanese, Philby thought.

  “It’s not their war,” Sheldrake said, glancing at Philby. “It’s ours. No matter what we do, we’re imposing. I think we just have to reduce that imposition to a minimum.”

  “I see,” Tatsumi said. “Do you know the story of a man named Joseph Caiaphas?” she asked him.

  “No,” Philby said. She queried the others with a look as they seated themselves in the tiny cockpit. None of them did.

  Across the channel between the two worlds, on clouded and storm-wracked Genji, Robert Carnot walked around the temple site, watching the Irdizu workers stalk on strong high chicken-legs around the site of the temple, carrying bricks and mortar and buckets of sloshing paste-thick paint. He rubbed his neck beneath the pressure seal, wondering how much longer this shift before he could take a rest, lie down. He disliked Genji’s gravity and climate intensely. His back ached, his legs ached, his neck and shoulders ached from the simple weight of his arms. He looked longingly up at the point in the sky where Chujo would be, if they could see it through the rapidly scudding gloom.

  The boss of the temple construction crew, a sturdy female named Tsmishfak, approached him with a pronounced swagger of pride. It was good that they should feel proud of what they had accomplished; their pride was good, not the civilized, stately antithesis of resentment that had so often brought Carnot’s kind low.

  “Tzhe in spatch endED,” Tsmishfak told him, eyes glancing back and forth on her sloping fish head. The Irdizu had adapted quickly to this kind of pidgin, much more merciful to their manner of speech than to the humans’. The Japanese had never thought of creating a pidgin; the rationals would despise Carnot for doing so. But at least human and Irdizu could talk without translators intervening.

  “Tzhe in spatch finitchED?” he asked, using an Irdizu inquisitive inflection.

  “FinitchED,” Tsmishfak confirmed.

  “Then let me see, and if it matches the Chujoan dimensions—which I’m sure it does—we’ll begin the consecration, and I can move on to the next village.” Tsmishfak understood most of this unpidg
ined speech.

  She guided him through the fresh pounding rain—each drop like a strike of hail—to the site he had laid out two weeks before. The temple’s exterior was still under construction; when completed, the walls would be smooth and white and square, sloping to the broad foundations to withstand the tidal inundations Tsmishfak’s village experienced every few Genjian years. Muddy rain fell along the unplastered bricks in gray runnels; clay scoured by clouds from the high mountains above the village’s plateau. He would be a Golem-like mess before this day was over.

  The in spatch—inner space, interior—was indeed finitchED. Within the temple, out of the sting of clayed rain, the walls were painted a dreadful seasick green, the paint pigments mixed from carpet whale slime and algoid dyes. Tsmishfak had assured him this was a most desirable color to the Irdizu, a sacred color, as yellow might be to a human. Carnot pretended to admire the effect, then noticed he was dripping mud on the clean green floor. Tsmishfak was as well.

  “Lengd it,” Carnot said, which meant simply, “I will length it,” or “I will measure it.” Tsmishfak backed away, awed by this moment.

  Carnot wiped mud from his face plate and produced a simple string coiled on a spool in his pocket. The string unwound from the two halves of the spool into two lengths; he had made up this device several months before, aware that the temples were nearing completion and some sort of masonic service would be necessary.

  By hand gestures up, Carnot indicated that the spool came from Chujo. That was a lie. No matter. What was important was the spiritual import.

  He stretched one string along the north wall, found it matched precisely, then stretched the second string along the east wall. The second string was the same length as the first; the second wall was the same length as the first. He then produced a simple metal protractor, machined aboard their ship in orbit at his request, and measured the angles of each corner. Ninety degrees. A fine square box painted sick green. Perfect.