by Fritz Leiber
Without anger whipping him on, Jarles might have stopped then and there and walked into the Sanctuary and down into the crypts, so stupid and uncomprehending were the commoners' reactions, so obviously did they misinterpret every word. At first they had seemed only shocked and bewildered, though attentive as always. Then—when he had called upon them to think and judge —they had looked vaguely apprehensive, as if all this rigmarole were merely the introduction to some assignment of physical labor, literally harder than work in the mines. The story of the Golden Age had lulled them. It was something familiar. His last sentence had shattered the lull and brought them again into that state of stupid, anxious gawking.
But what else could he expect? If he could only manage to plant the seeds of questioning in just one commoner!
"There was a Golden Age. That much is true. Though as far as I know there was plenty of toil and sorrow in it. But at least all men had a little freedom and were getting more. The getting of it meant trouble—lots of it—and at one point the scientists became frightened and… but you don't even know what a scientist is, do you? Any more than you know what a doctor is, or a lawyer, or a judge, or a teacher, or a scholar, or a statesman, or an executive, or, so help me, an artist. Because the priests are all of those things. They've rolled all the professions, all the privileged classes into one. You don't rightly know even what a priest is! There were religions in those days, you see, and worship of a god—in the Golden Age and the long ages before it, ever since man fought his way up, with hands and brain, to mastery of this planet. But the priests of those religions dealt only in spiritual and moral matters—at least at such times as they were wise and good. Other work they left for other professions. And they didn't use force.
"But that's getting ahead of my story. I want to tell you about the scientists, and how the Golden Age ended. A scientist is a thinker. He's a thinker about how things happen. He watches things happen. Then if he knows a thing can happen, and if it's a thing men want, maybe he can figure out—by thinking and hard work—how to help it happen. No magic, see? No supernatural powers. Just watching, and thinking, and working."
He had forgotten to wonder why he had not been silenced. He thought only of how to choose the right words, how to hammer or ease them home—anything to get a flicker out of those faces!
"The scientists of the Golden Age became afraid that mankind was slipping back into barbarism and ignorance. Their position as members of a privileged profession was threatened. They decided that, for a time, they must take control of the world. They were not strong enough to do it directly. They weren't fighters. So they got the idea of establishing a new religion, modeled on the old religions, but powered by science. In the old religions, blessings and cursings worked through men's minds. In the religion the scientists established, blessings and cursings worked directly, by force!
"You want proof? You should want proof. Here it is!"
His hand whipped downward from collar to hem of his heavy, scarlet robe. A metal-edged slit appeared. He quickly stepped through it, bare except for a pair of scarlet trunks. Many of the commoners shuddered and shrank back, wincing. To see a priest unrobed was blasphemous. True, the priest had done it himself. But somehow they might be to blame.
"You have been taught that inviolability proceeds from the priest, a divine aura projected by his holy flesh and controlled by his will power. Watch!"
He slapped the breast of the empty robe smartly. Instantly it mushroomed outward. He pushed it away from him. It floated out and down from the bench. Commoners shoved wildly and clawed at each other, in their desire to avoid being touched by it.
It came to rest about two feet from the ground, jogging up and down gently, for all the world like a recumbent priest, complete even to the puffed scarlet gloves—except that there was no gleaming shaven head under the eerily glowing violet halo which all men knew to be an outward sign of the priest's holy thoughts.
The panic-stricken ones regathered in a circle around it, at what they hoped was a safe and reverent distance.
Jarles' voice was bitter as medicine. "Maybe you can get to the Hierarchy's heaven the way that robe's trying to. I know of no other. Can't you see it's a trick? Rip open that robe"—a commoner gaped horrifiedly at him for a moment, thinking the words a command—"and you'll find a network of fine wires. What does the Great God need with wires? They make what's called a bilateral, short-range, multi-purpose repulsor field. Something that pushes, see? Something very useful for protecting a priest from injury and powering his flabby fingers so that they're stronger than those of a smith's. And it props up his halo! Stop gawking at it, you fools! It's just a trick, I tell you!
"How do I know all this?" he fairly bellowed at them. "You ought to ask that question. Well—the priests told me! Yes, the priests! Do you know what happens to a young man when he passes the tests and is admitted to the Hierarchy as a novice?" That got them, he could tell. It took a racy question like that to whet their dull curiosity. "A lot of things happen to him you don't know about. I'm just going to tell you one. He's told, gradually, in small doses—but unmistakably—that there is no Great God. That there are no supernatural powers. That the priests are scientists ruling the world for its own good. That it's his duty to help them and his good fortune to share in the benefits.
"Don't you see? The scheme of the Golden Age scientists worked. Their new religion swept the world. And as soon as they got the world firmly by the throat, they were able to mold it just the way they wanted. For themselves, they made a regimented, monastic paradise. To find a model for the commoners' world, they went back to a time called the Middle Ages and dug up a nice little thing called serfdom. Oh, they cleaned it up a bit, made it orderly and healthy, and added a few touches of downright slavery. But otherwise they didn't change it one jot. It was just the thing to keep a whole world in a state of frightened, ignorant, back-broken, grateful servitude.
"Surely, they averted barbarism. By establishing it!
"There was one very special wrinkle about the Middle Ages that you got a taste of today. My priestly educators haven't got around to telling me about it, but I can see the why and wherefore of it all right. Witchcraft! Don't cringe, you idiots! It's just another of their tricks, we can be sure. Some of the old religions had witchcraft mixed up with them, catering to the cheapest superstitions and fears. The scientists decided their religion ought to have a witchcraft, too. So they let scatterbrained old women like Mother Jujy go around pretending to tell fortunes, cast spells, and brew love potions. Just the thing to strengthen superstition and give commoners a bit of an outlet. And a marvelous straw man to knock down with their scientific exorcisms. Besides providing a neat excuse for getting at people they don't like, such as that girl you saw accused today."
He looked around for Sharlson Naurya, but could not find her in the crowd. Or Brother Chulian. It was getting dim. The small white sea of faces was beginning to smudge a little. He realized, with a start, that the sun had set. A chill breeze was trickling down from the hillside farmlands, making him shiver in his nakedness.
And still the Hierarchy held its hand. Round about the Square priests stood by twos, watching, doing nothing—wine-dark shadows.
But he fancied he saw a trace of something more than ignorant curiosity and bewildered awe in two or three of the white faces spread out before him. And, as a man in polar snows nurses the tiny flame that is all that stands between him and death by cold—cupping his hands around it, breathing upon it with infinite gentleness, shredding upon it tiny crumbs of tinder—so Jarles nursed that trace of genuine understanding he fancied he saw, but which might be only a trick of the shadows.
"Some of you heard why Sharlson Naurya was accused of witchcraft. She was ordered to serve in the Sanctuary and refused. Refused with courage and simple decency. So a priest of the Great God reached forward those chubby, uncalloused fingers stronger than a smith's and made witchmarks on her shoulder before he ripped down her smock.
"All of you must guess why
Sharlson Naurya refused. All of you know who lives there." He pointed down a dark little street next to the Sanctuary. Eyes followed his finger. "Fallen sisters, they're called. Girls chosen by the Hierarchy for the holy sisterhoods, who then so sinned against the Great God that they could neither be suffered to remain in the Sanctuary nor permitted to return home to infect the innocent. So the Great God in his infinite mercy gives them a place where they may live apart." His voice was thick with irony. "You know! Some of you have been there yourselves, when the priests would tolerate it."
At that, the faintest of murmurings came from the crowd.
"Who takes your sweetest daughters for the sisterhoods, Commoners of Megatheopolis?
"Who sends you to the fields, the roads, the mines, to waste your years and break your backs?
"Who gives you fake thrills to deaden the pain?"
And now the muttering had become an angry murmur-hag. Stone-blind resentment, except perhaps in two or three cases, but dangerous. Around the edges of the square, violet will-o'-the-wisps began to glow, and there was a slight bulging of the wine-dark shadows, Jarles instantly caught at it.
"See them switch on their inviolability! Puff themselves up for safety. They're afraid of you, Commoners of Megatheopolis. Deadly afraid.
"With their holy gadgets the priests could farm the whole world, web it with perfect roads, honeycomb it with mines. And not one man lift pick or spade.
"There's another story you're told. How, when the Hierarchy has finally purified all mankind, the Great God will usher in another Golden Age, the New Golden Age, the Golden Age without Dross.
"I ask you—and especially the old ones among you—doesn't the New Golden Age get further and further away every year? Don't the priests keep pushing it further and further into the future? Until now it's only a hazy dream, something to lull your little children to sleep with when they're half dead from their first day's work and crying?
"Maybe those Golden Age scientists did intend to restore mankind, when the threat of barbarism was finally past. I guess they did.
"But now the priests think only one thing. How to hold on to their power as long as mankind lasts—until the sun darkens and the earth freezes!"
Then he realized that the muttering had died and that the commoners were no longer looking at him, but upward. An eerie, leaden blue light was illuminating their faces, until they looked like a crowd of drowned men. And this time his eyes followed theirs.
The Great God had leaned forward, blotting out the first, faint evening stars, until his gigantic face was peering straight down at them, his blue nimbus blazing in all its deathly glory.
"Behold their greatest trick!" Jarles shouted. "The Incarnate God! The Almighty Automaton!"
But they were not listening to him, and now that he had stopped speaking, his teeth were chattering from the cold. He hugged his arms to stop the shivering, alone on his little bench that now seemed very low.
"It has come," the commoners were thinking. "It was all a test, as we might have known. Unfair—except the priests are never, never unfair. We should not have listened. We should not have been moved. And now we are to be blasted for our sin, for the greatest sin—to think a thought against the Hierarchy."
The hand of the Great God thrust downward, like a falling steeple checked in mid-air. The extended index finger, thick as a tree trunk, pointed at the puffed robe Jarles had cast aside, and which still hung two feet above the ground.
Crackling, coruscating blue light snaked from nimbus to mountainous shoulder and down the arm, spat like lightning from the fingertip. The empty robe glowed, frizzled, puffed a little more, then burst with a hollow pop, like a seaweed bladder in a fire.
That sound, and the spatter of red-hot fragments, thawed the frozen panic. The crowd broke, began to race toward the narrow, dark mouths of the streets—any street, it made no difference, so long as they got out of the square.
The crackling beam moved slowly toward the bench on which Jarles still stood, fusing the cobblestones, leaving a red-hot trough in its wake—a sign and mark for all times to come of the Great God's divine wrath.
He waited for it.
There was a swooping of blackness, a beat as of gigantic shadowy wings. And then around the renegade priest had closed an irregular sphere—mottled with blackness, inkily smeared, so that through it his naked body was still vaguely visible.
And the irregular sphere had the form of two great clawed hands, cupped together.
The blue beam from the Great God's finger moved swiftly then, impinged upon the sphere, crackled against it, showering blue sparks.
The sphere drank the beam and grew not one whit less black.
The beam thickened to a writhing pillar of blue light, turning the square to day and driving back the air in hot waves.
And still it only spattered harmlessly against the black-streaked, irregular sphere of the cupped hands.
It was still possible to glimpse the form of the renegade priest inside them, like an insect miraculously alive in the heart of a flame.
Then a great, evilly mirthful voice that seemed to blow the hot air from the square in one breath, that stopped every fleeing commoner in his tracks and turned him around to stare in paralyzed terror at the black and flaming spectacle.
"The Lord of Evil defies the Great God!
"The Lord of Evil takes this man for his own."
The cupped hands jerked away, upward, off, and out of sight.
Then gales of satanic laughter that seemed to rock the Sanctuary itself.
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Chapter 2
"Brother Jarles has begun to harangue the crowd in the Great Square, your resplendent archpriestship."
"Good! Send the reports in to me at the Apex Council as soon as he is finished."
Brother Goniface, priest of the Seventh Circle, arch-priest, chief voice of the Realists in the Apex Council, smiled—but the smile was not apparent in the pale, lion-like mask of his face. He had touched off a bomb that would blast the Apex Council out of its complacency—both the Moderates, with their flabby compromises, and his own Realists, with their mulish conservatism.
His dangerous little experiment was running now and couldn't very well be stopped, let Brother Frejeris and the rest of the Moderates yelp as much as they wanted to—afterwards.
For afterwards everything would be neatly rounded off. Brother Jarles would be dead, frizzled by the Great God's wrath—an instructive example for the commoners and any other dissatisfied young priests. And Goniface would be able to explain at leisure to the Apex Council just how much vital information had been gained by study of the artificial crisis he had fomented.
Only at times like this did a man really live! To have power was good. To use it dangerously was better.
But to use it in fighting an enemy perhaps as strong as yourself was best of all.
He adjusted his gold-worked scarlet robe, commanded the great doors to open, and strode into the Council Chamber.
At the far end of the vast, pearly room, on an extensive dais, was a long table, with every seat behind it occupied by a gorgeously robed archpriest—every seat save one.
Goniface relished that long walk the length of the Council Chamber, with all the rest of them already in place. He liked to know that they were watching him every step of the way, hoping he would stumble slightly or scuff the floor, just once. Liked to think how they would spring on him like famished cats if they had the slightest inkling of the secret of his past, that darkest of dark jests.
Liked to know it, and then forget it!
For that long walk across the Council Chamber under those critical eyes gave Goniface something that no other archpriest seemed quite to understand. Something that he would not have allowed excitement over a dozen Jarleses to rob him of. An opportunity to drink in, at its richest and most tense, the power and glory of the Hierarchy—stablest government the world had ever known. The only government fully worth a strong man's effort
to maintain and to dominate it. Built on a thousand lies—like all governments, thought Goniface—yet perfectly adapted to solve the intricate problems of human society. And so constituted, by virtue of its rigid social stratification, that the more a member of the priestly elite struggled for power in it, the more closely did he identify himself with the aims and welfare of that elite.
At times like these Brother Goniface became a visionary. He could look through the soaring, softly pearl-gray walls of the Council Chamber, and watch the busy, efficient working of the Sanctuary—sense its uninterrupted hum of intellectual and executive activity, its subtle pleasures. Then outward, past the limits of the Sanctuary, across the checkerboard of neatly tilled fields, around the curve of the earth, to the gleaming walls of other sanctuaries—the rural ones simple and modest hermitages, the urban ones each with its cathedral and Almighty Automaton brooding over a great square. And still farther than that, across blue oceans, to other continents and gorgeous tropical islands. And everywhere to see in vision and sense with a pleasure-beyond-pleasure the workings of the scarlet robe—from the lamaseries clinging unshakably to the titan Himalaya, to the snug stations buried deep in Antarctica. Everywhere the sanctuaries, webbing the whole world, like the ganglia of some globular marine organism, floating in the sea of space.
And then even beyond that—to heaven itself!
After he had walked a little more than halfway, his imagination began its return journey. And now it followed the lines of the social pyramid, or cone. First the broad base of commoners—that necessary, bestial, almost mindless substratum. Then a thin layer of deacons—insulation. Then the novices and rank and file of the first two circles of the priesthood, accounting for more than seven-eighths of the scarlet robes. Then, the cone swiftly narrowing, the various higher circles, each with its special domain of interest and endeavor, until the small Seventh Circle of major executives was reached.
And, on top of all, the archpriests and the Apex Council.
And, whether or not they knew it, whether or not they unconsciously feared or desired it, himself on top of that!