by Moshe Ben-Or
But where would they serve the Breaking of the Bread when the weather did not permit holding it outdoors? In the main nave, in front of the statue of the crucified zombie, with the frescoes and stained glass depicting his imaginary life and ministry looking down on the priestess as she recited the blessing?
Where would parishioners practice the Sacred Ritual during Celebrations? In public, like animals, with everyone seeing and comparing the forbidden fruit which belonged to their neighbors? He didn’t need Lora Duarte’s knowledge of Scripture to determine the propriety of that.
And what use was the Salvador Chapel in the first place? The post-Assembly Sunday Mass at the Tent of Meeting consistently attracted well over ten thousand worshipers. The numbers were growing steadily, week to week. What would Dame Lora even do with a chapel that could barely seat four hundred?
“It is unsuitable,” said the dean. “Unsuitable and a sacrilege.
“How many times do I need to tell you to stop praying to that false god?”
He could force her to stop wearing the little golden cross, thought the professor, but her mind was another matter altogether.
He couldn’t very well set her aside over it. It didn’t constitute valid Grounds in itself, according to the Regulation. She was obedient enough. She submitted and turned the other cheek, the way her crucified god told her to. Not that she really had a choice, in this brave new world.
Besides, it would be a scandal. She was the first girl he’d Pinned. She was with him before the War, for almost two years. He’d taken her virginity. The Dean had to set an example.
“I’ve stopped,” breathed Penny, pleadingly. “It’s a beautiful old building, that’s all. I’m sad to see it go.”
She was lying, of course, thought the dean. That vile cult of hers had a way to grasp the mind. Worse still, he simply couldn’t suppress it by force. At least not outright. Too many still believed in the Zombie, both on this campus and off. Many more yet believed in the Zombie’s mother. At least she could be repurposed somehow; as a personification of the Goddess, perhaps. Or simply reduced to a quaint children’s tale, in the manner in which the Zombie’s followers had tolerated Lady Katarina and El Barão Morte.
“Hernan the Great slaughtered your ancestors and mine in their tens of millions, in the name of that filthy corpse,” said Klaus Weinberger, stilling her caressing hand, “and turned the few pitiful survivors into slaves. They knelt before the Crucified only to save their lives. Or have you forgotten?”
“Not all our ancestors,” replied Penny.
She sounded close to tears, thought the dean. And she was right, of course.
The Blanco States had been far too numerous and far too heterogeneous for such sweeping generalizations. Well over half had paid at least some lip service to the quaint old notion of religious freedom. A good quarter had really meant it. It had even worked for a little bit, while their populations remained homogeneous, and all their people believed in minor variations of the exact same thing.
Many of the ones for whom it had worked best in the beginning had been stupid enough to add the ticking time bomb of porous borders to the ticking time bomb of religious disunity. Wise King Hernan would attack those first, when he took the throne. Some would collapse from within at a single push from his spies, leaving his armies to arrive as peacemakers.
No more than a third of the Second Landers had embraced the Goddess. Others had prayed to the Allmother, or put their faith in the Eternal Spirit, or set their feet upon the Noble Eightfold Path, or worshiped pagan godlings and sainted ancestors. A good third had knelt before the Cross from the beginning. Still others had believed in nothing at all.
Nor was the Monarchy the monolithic, Catholic, herdeiro juggernaut modern-day VR made it out to be. Things had been far more complex than that. Far too complex for the comfort of simple-minded modern-day ideologues and ignorant consumers of mass-oriented action-historical VR. At least until King Hernan’s Great Terror made them less so.
His own ten-times-great grandfather, Ugo Weinberger, illegitimate son of a Mirandan ritter come to seek his fortune upon his mother’s birthworld, had won both hacienda and title in what would soon be Aguiaima, fighting for King Hernan.
No Weinberger had ever upturned his palms before the Ankh. The closest his ancestors had ever come to slavery, was holding the handle of a whip. White skin or not, they’d been addressed as “Cabalero” and “Señor.” Though no herdeiro of their station would mingle his blood with theirs, Ugo Weinberger’s descendants would go on to hold the land, and ship in wives from the Old Planet, and build up their wealth for a century and a half, until changing economics and the accumulation of bad political choices took both wealth and hacienda away.
Dame Lora’s herdeiro family, for all its pure bloodlines, had clung to the Goddess in secret, beneath the Catholic facade. They’d never been wealthy enough to own a single learned blanco, and they had knelt before the Cross solely for fear of their lives. The Duartes had hidden the family secret for almost four centuries on end. Dame Lora would have taken it to her grave, had fate and the Zin not intervened.
Who knew where Penny’s ancestors had really stood, on both sides of the Unification’s battle lines? Who knew which deity they had really worshiped, back in the days before ninety-nine percent of the planet had come to worship nothing at all, beyond the meaningless triad of full stomach, satisfied gonads and entertaining VR? She could almost pass for a herdeira. Almost.
“I am sorry, dear”, answered the dean, kissing the hand he’d captured. “I am being cruel. It has been a stressful day, for both of us. I’ll let the chapel stand, since you’re so fond of it. There are still a few who go there, after all. Patronless CA girls, mostly, or so I’m told. It wouldn’t do to deprive them of their little bit of solace, however false it may be. We’ll pick another site for the new office tower.”
“Thank you, Dean,” replied Penny, nuzzling his neck.
Ownerless white-tab girls had no careers to worry about, mused Klaus Weinberger, and no position to lose. Once someone claimed them, they stopped coming, almost universally. There was no official policy against it, of course. But everyone on campus knew what the unofficial policy was.
San Cristobal wasn’t built in a day. The time would come when there were none. That time wasn’t far off. He could wait a year or two. Perhaps he’d turn the old chapel into a museum, then. It was, after all, indeed a beautiful, historic space. The oldest building on campus.
Two hundred years from now, it would be just a tourist attraction. The tiny antechamber to a far larger complex. A reminder of the bad, dead old ways, and of the inexorable, planet-wide transition to the One True Faith.
Penny could have her little victory, thought Dean Weinberger, and even a bit of reward. She was using the Sacred Way, after all. Clumsily, and for a bad cause, but she was. That was progress in itself.
She would believe, he thought. And if she didn’t, her children would. The Goddess was patient. She would believe, truth be told, probably before he did.
He hadn’t gone this route because he believed. That distinction belonged to Dame Lora. He hadn’t gone this way to recapture a mythical lost greatness, in order to finally defeat and bury ancient prejudices, or out of a deep-seated desire to avenge centuries of historical wrongs, not to mention decades of personal slights. Jacques Delavre and Mark Jamesson had walked that path to the Goddess, not him.
He’d simply needed a Religion. There was no substitute for the Divine, whether in the foxhole, or out of it. No other source of unity would do. There was no other long-term guarantee of continued social health, when push came to shove. He’d found that out the hard way.
He’d fought for Reason and Equality. He’d struggled to dethrone irrational primitivism and defeat the prejudices of old. The Zombie and his priests had stood behind the king, and so the Zombie had become his enemy, along with the system he’d despised.
He had seen the king overthrown, and the dictator who’d come
after. He’d presided over the old system’s demolition. He’d seen Reason, Freedom and Equality win the day. And he’d lived long enough after the glorious victory to see exactly how all that had turned out.
Reason had won, all right. And promptly reasoned itself right into the gutter. The Equality he’d fought for had turned out to be the equality of the lowest common denominator. The Revolution he’d dreamt of all his life had indeed brought Freedom to the planet.
Freedom to exalt sterile promiscuity and lay low the family unit. Freedom to murder the institutions of Marriage and Motherhood, and enthrone in their place selfish narcissism coupled with infantile consumerism. Freedom to abandon all things Sacred, and to chase instead, endlessly, after momentary pleasure. Freedom to replace the orderly procession of life stages with the futile, unfulfilling, never-ending and ultimately self-destructive quest to hold on to fleeting youth. Freedom to go from the Dictatorship of the Individual to the dictatorship of the belly-and-dick. Freedom to commit slow-motion suicide on a planetary scale, and to ultimately die not with a bang, but with a whimper, as a foreign army disembarked onto the streets of San Cristobal with nary a shot fired.
Worthless morons breeding happily in the barrios, fed by the ever-full, taxpayer-funded welfare troth, while the pure gold of the best DNA lingered and died in the ornate cages of mansions and boardrooms and ivory towers, producing hardly any offspring at all. Birth rates among the best and brightest falling unsustainably below replacement. Incoming students at the planet’s top universities getting objectively dumber year by year, even as rigged tests and inflated grades and politically correct propaganda proclaimed their generation to be the brightest and most talented that had ever lived. Society slowly rotting away, bit by imperceptible bit. And the planet falling ever farther behind.
What was Paradise in his youth, when he’d yelled slogans against the king over a bit of corruption and a few broken heads, and what had it been before the Zin bombs fell, with armed Leaguers swaggering about the streets of San Cristobal, protected by de jure extraterritoriality, while the Cortes quivered in its fancy designer shoes over threats to seize the jump points by armed force, if the tug and transit fees were raised too far?
He’d had no power to change things by then. He’d given up the reins long ago, in the name of democracy and the common good. There’d been no way to take them back, and no way to turn the course of history, anyway. The tools did not exist. He’d, himself, dismantled them.
All he had left were his lonely old age, his fine collection of aches and pains, his halfhearted research and his unfinished memoirs. And reminiscences over Dame Lora’s pastelitos and tea. And the occasional pretty wannabe crusader for social justice who couldn’t wait to gush her hero worship all over his bedroom sheets, before, during and after she told him all about how reading “Letters From Prison” in high school had forever changed her life, and how her parents had wanted her to study medicine, engineering or business instead.
His consolation prizes for eight and a half decades of friends and loved ones turned into bloodied corpses, of exploding bombs and firefights in the streets, of midnight raids by the Federales, of living on the edge, of fleeing at a moment’s notice from hiding places turned deathtraps, of brutal torture and a sacrificed youth, and broken health, and missed anti-aging series that would shave a good four decades off his life expectancy, and 3581 days spent in the mind-numbing solitude of a silent prison cell. His inadequate substitutes for a triumph turned hollow by thirty-four years of watching everything he’d fought for, slowly turning to wormwood and gall.
But then the Zin had come, and smashed the old world to splinters.
He’d felt it from the moment he’d woken on the couch, confused by the shouts and the pounding at his cottage door. He had seen it in their faces. He had heard it in their voices. The expectation. The hope. The demand.
Mark Jamesson and Hernan Pillár, brilliant, well-educated, tough men, looking at him as if he was a savior sent by Heaven. Iago Martín and Hesus Barboza, geniuses of the first order, hanging on his every word, faces like lost puppies bereft of their mother. Half the students at the Assembly in tears from fear, the boys as well as the girls.
And then Diego Vargas had snapped to and saluted, and Julien Remarque had followed suit, and the years had fallen away for him as they had for them. Gone were the pudgy civil engineer and the mild-mannered professor of theatrical arts. In their place stood a guards light infantry corporal who’d once been wounded storming Palmer’s palace, and a captain of the armored corps who’d come back from the Miranda Expedition on a stretcher, but with the Estrella de Valor pinned to his chest. And gone also was the semi-retired professor emeritus from the Department of Sociology, with his unfinished memoirs and his old-age aches and pains. And the ball-headed cane he’d leaned on for a good two decades was suddenly up under his arm, like a Royal Army officer’s swagger stick.
They needed orders to carry out. He had orders to give. This time around there was nothing left to preserve of the old order, in the name of humanity or in the name of anything else. This time there were only ruins and ashes, and growing piles of corpses, and chaos, and the prospect of an alien occupation.
The storm had broken upon them all without warning. What would emerge after the storm had passed was entirely up to him. And he’d needed a Religion.
He’d had, really, only two choices in the matter. Only one of two banners could plausibly be raised above his battalions. Only one of two weapons could possibly be used to break the back of the sterile atheist-feminist hydra, to tear out its manifold poison tongues and sever its countless ugly heads. Only one of two tools could dig the evil monster’s grave and bury its stinking corpse. Only one of two flavors of Holy Fire could conceivably purge from the body of his new world the enfeebling philosophical ulcers of the old.
Retrace old steps and tread again the well-trodden old path, hoping against hope that repeating the same experiment would not lead to the same outcome? Or step sideways despite the thorns, and tread the path never taken?
Choose the Cross. Choose the Ankh. There was no third option. The Deity who defended this planet had to spring from its sacred soil.
Would he raise up the banner of King Hernan’s cheek-turning crucified zombie, whose Kingdom was not of this world, whose worshipers became instant hypocrites the moment they dared to as much as lift a finger in self-defense? Or would he choose the Living Goddess who reigned from within her followers’ bodies, Her who sent forth Her Mighty Beast and fought to inherit the stars?
Was it redemption in the hereafter that he would give them, or redemption in the here and now?
Was it life eternal in some imaginary Heaven that he would ask them to sacrifice themselves for, or was it life eternal through tangible, real-world offspring, who would carry their precious DNA into the future?
Did he choose to ask the planet’s best-educated and brightest to believe in talking snakes and magic apples and a world some seventy-five hundred years old? Or did he take advantage of the fact that those who’d blackened the name of King Hernan had, by extension, burnished the names of his enemies, and those who’d worked tirelessly to undermine the Cross had, though they would neither admit nor acknowledge nor even understand it, by extension worked to elevate the Ankh?
There’d been no real choice to make, when he’d framed it to himself in those stark terms.
What emotions, after all, could the stained glass of the old campus cathedral have possibly evoked within the souls of the men who’d survived the Siege? What did they have in common with the crucified zombie? What could they possibly think as they watched him consort with a prostitute and save an adulteress from her just deserts, wash the feet of his disciples and dine, like a fool, with the one who would betray him? What could they possibly see in the Zombie as he carried his own cross, and then suffered upon it? What use to them was a god whose great distinction was that he’d gotten himself crowned with thorns and nailed to a pair of crossed sticks
?
How would this allegedly all-powerful deity defend them, when he couldn’t, or worse yet wouldn’t, even defend himself? Why would an all-powerful father sacrifice his one begotten son to relieve the sins of mankind, when he could simply forgive them? What kind of god was this son in the first place, if he could die on a cross?
And what did they feel, those Poly Men, when they came to the Tent of Meeting today, and gazed upon the stained glass windows that would soon decorate the rapidly rising Temple of the Goddess? What did they feel, they who had only yesterday stood shoulder-to-shoulder upon the Wall, makeshift muskets clutched in white-knuckled hands, as they watched the wounded, bleeding Beast rise to defend His precious Goddess with bared tooth and reddened claw? What did they envision, they who had turned savage beasts themselves, who closed eyes every night to nightmares full of bloating corpses, screaming Looters, bloodied bayonets and booming cannon, as they watched the Beast become ever more human in pane upon pane, clawing his way forward from Savagery to Civilization, blessed by His Goddess at every step as He Labored in the sweat of His brow?
What did they perceive, they who worked twenty-hour days to rebuild a shattered world, as they saw Him hunt with a stone-tipped spear and fish with a handmade net, domesticate creatures and till the soil, mine ore and hammer metal, dig clay and lay brick, hew wood and sail the seas, tame the lightning and split the atom, take to the skies and fire rockets into space, drive a flagpole into sterile regolith and unlock the secrets of DNA in His tireless efforts to feed and clothe, and shelter, and protect, and expand the habitat, until He sat, finally, surrounded by abstruse mathematics, blueprint starship before Him, plotting to take His Goddess forth on the ultimate journey, and give Her even the stars?
Who, better than them, now understood the lessons of history? Who, having felt the fragility of precious Civilization upon his own hide, yet dared to deny the sanctity of Her Holy Mission?