A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Very clever,” Veneem said with a slow, sad shake of his head. “Doctor Baken has managed to twist everything. Everyone knows, and Revealed Truth confirms, that we built the cities ages ago. They are now forbidden because they were the cause of our fall from grace. When we built them we separated ourselves from the land and the sun. For that we were punished—the cities were destroyed by God and we were banished from them forever.”

  He rubbed his injured ribs gingerly, then snatched his bow from Rana.

  “No more talk! I’m going to find another way up there, and when I get to him I’ll finish him.”

  Rana watched him briefly as he began to reload the weapon, then wheeled and ran to the edge of the gully where she had dropped her own bow. After checking to see that the bolt was still in place, she called over her shoulder in a low voice:

  “I’m going up this way. If I have to hit him in the other leg to bring him down, I will. But I’m going to take him alive.”

  Veneem’s voice was strained as he jolted forward. “Stay out of there—he’s still dangerous!”

  Rana ignored him and entered the gully. He finished loading as quickly as he could and went after her. He watched as she moved swiftly, cautiously up the center of the gorge. She was almost to the bend when Veneem saw the stone. It was smaller than its predecessors—about the size of a human head—and had been thrown rather than rolled. It bounced once on the granite floor, then flew straight for Rana. She made to dive out of its way but slipped on an icy patch and fell against the far wall.

  The bones of her right foot made a sickening noise as they were crushed.

  Rana writhed on her side, her face contorted in agony. Low guttural sounds, half moan, half grunt, escaped between her clenched teeth as she tried to move the stone off her foot.

  fter a shocked, frozen instant, Veneem broke into a run and passed Rana without a second look. He had to reach the hairy before the next rock came. Rounding the bend, he saw the beast desperately trying to dislodge a larger stone, one that would surely finish Rana if it started to roll. But it was wounded—fresh blood covered its left leg—and its strength wasn’t up to the task. When it saw the green fury that was Veneem charging up the gully, it began to retreat.

  The hairy clawed and scrambled along the ledge, its wounded leg dragging like an anchor. Veneem thought he saw something almost like human fear in its eyes as it glanced over its shoulder at him, heard something almost human about the gibberish that burst from its mouth, sensed something almost human in the way it rolled on its back and frantically waved its hands as he stood within arm’s length and aimed his crossbow at its head.

  But it died like any other animal when the bolt split its skull.

  “I think you’re going to lose it,” Veneem said as he gave Rana’s foot a final inspection. It was swollen, misshapen, the skin had split in three places and showed numerous areas of brownish discoloration.

  A fire was blazing in the hearth, dancing light off the smooth green of Rana’s skin as she sat before it. Her wounded foot rested on a folded blanket which in turn rested on a short stool. The bleeding had stopped. The pain had not.

  “You’ll have to get Baken in the morning,” she said.

  “I’ll not have that man near you.”

  “He’s the only doctor in the enclave! If the foot must come off, he’ll know where to cut. I won’t let anyone else touch me.”

  Knowing she was right but refusing to admit it, Veneem said nothing. He turned to the hearth and rotated the spit. He was tired. It had been no easy task to carry Rana to the horses, then fetch the dead hairy, then guide all home. He was feeling his age, especially in his ribs and his left shoulder—there was blood on the dressing over this morning’s incision but he hadn’t got around to changing it yet.

  But at least everything was in its place now. Rana was warming herself by the fire, the carcass of the hairy was dressed and hanging in the cold shed while Veneem roasted a piece of it on the spit. He had cut off the right shank as a celebratory feast of sorts; the rest would go to the central supply shed in the morning. A glance at Rana’s wound and he realized there was probably something symbolic in the cut of meat he chose.

  He sliced off a small piece and dropped it into a wooden bowl which he then placed in his daughter’s lap.

  “Come. Eat. You’ll need all the nourishment you can get when regeneration starts, especially since there’s no sunlight worth mentioning this time of year.”

  “Not hungry,” she said. She was physically and emotionally spent and Veneem did his best to be solicitous.

  “Of course you are. You haven’t had this much activity in a long, long time. You must be ravenous. And this has always been your favorite.”

  “No.” She swallowed hard—her salivary glands had been activated by the sight and smell of the meat. “You didn’t have to kill it.”

  “Yes, I did. And for more than one reason.” He squatted before her and took her hand. “First of all, it hurt you. Nothing can hurt you and be allowed to live. Second, if we had brought it back alive as you wished—and I’m not really sure we could have—you’d have begun publicly spouting the madness that Baken’s put into your head. And that would mean the end of you. The Elders would have no choice then but to order your death. Third, because this catch makes me First Hunter beyond any doubt. And last . . .” He paused, catching and holding her gaze. “And last, I killed the hairy because it’s the law that all hairies are to be killed. They’re very scarce now and we might never see one again. But if I should come upon another, I’ll kill it. And that settles the matter. I want no more discussion on it. Eat your dinner.”

  Rana sighed and picked up the piece of meat. It was hot and firm with a thin coating of grease that oozed onto her fingers. She nibbled at it. No sense in letting such a delicacy go to waste.

  BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY

  Saw God last week. Or maybe it was just St. Bartholomew. Looked more like Bartholomew, but could have been God.

  He came to me in the night, a vision dangling from my ceiling, twisting slowly in the air like a corpse hanging from a gibbet. Said the birth rate was down. Down. Told me to warn everyone, especially the Church Elders. Told me to warn them right away.

  But I’ve been so busy lately.

  Actually, I’m afraid.

  (11:40 . . . about twenty minutes to spare)

  They’ll think I’m crazy. Paranoid, they’ll say. But not if I can get everything organized. Not if I can show them in black and white that there’s a plot afoot, a plot against the Church, a monstrous conspiracy that threatens everything generations of us have worked for. Been meaning to get organized for so long now, but can’t seem to get going.

  Maybe that’s part of the conspiracy, too. Maybe—

  For Birth’s sake, don’t start blaming your own foot-dragging on someone else. Next thing you know, your stubbed toe is someone else’s fault . . . then the pimple on your chin . . . then your backache. Soon you’re crazy.

  I’m not crazy. My church, the only church, the Church of the Divine Imperative, is in danger. God told me so Himself. I may be the only one who knows. But I can prove it. At least I think I can. With God’s help and without too much hindrance from Satan and His minions, the Elders will hear and believe. And act.

  But got to get organized. Got to sound sane. I have my folks’ files and scrapbooks from the old days. That’ll help. If I can put the plot in historical perspective, the Elders will be more receptive.

  To work. Start with a quote from St. Bartholomew. That’ll grab them. They can’t turn away from the words of the man who was the inspiration for the Church. And his words are as timely now as they were forty-odd years ago:

  . . . So I say again to you, the Divine Imperative was God’s first command to the first man and woman: “Be fruitful and multiply.” This was not a casual remark. God created the earth as no more than a staging area. This planet, this life—they are no more than a first evolutionary step toward the ultimate destiny
God has planned for His faithful. Nothing more than a staging area. In all the troubles through which you will pass, never forget that.

  Words to remember, to be sure. Especially now.

  After Bartholomew, how about these old pictures . . . everybody’s so plump-ugly. Population was so sparse back then I guess they had to eat more than they needed. Almost obscene to look that well fed. No worry about looking like that nowadays . . .

  Here’s a magazine article from back then. The non-believers did a lot of empty speculation as the movement started to take hold. This looks like a good one:

  . . . and sociologists are at a loss to explain it. Most of the Church’s members were raised in the one- and two-child family units that have been the norm. Yet the whole thrust of the Church of the Divine Imperative runs contrary to the trends of the past few decades. Instead of limiting family size out of concern for the environment and a desire to pursue more personal goals of self-fulfillment, the Procreationists, as they call themselves, have laid aside their cultural, religious, and social backgrounds to band together in a compulsive drive to bring as many new lives as possible into the world.

  It all started with a pamphlet called “The Next Plateau” by an enigmatic man known only as Bartholomew who is believed to have sprung from the ranks of the now-defunct Christian Right. He is the source of Procreationist theology—a dizzying mixture of right-to-life slogans, Far Eastern mysticism, and rigid fundamentalism. Bartholomew’s writings and passionate speeches fired up a significant segment of a generation. Procreationism has caught on. The Church of the Divine Imperative is spreading. Hopefully, for all our sakes, it will be short-lived.

  Time Magazine

  But we showed them—or at least my parents did. Being second-generation Procreationist, I spent most of my life listening to my folks and their friends swap tales about the early days of the Church. Must have been exciting to be in the vanguard, to be shaping history. Wish I could have been there.

  The glory of it! They were outsiders in their day, struggling against the Satan-inspired population-control forces that ran the governments of the world. Hard to imagine today, with everybody Procreationist, but back in the old days they were a tiny, persecuted minority. The bureaucratic machinery and its allies in the media did their damnedest—an appropriate word, that—to curb the growth of the Church. Said we threatened to unbalance the environment, accelerate pollution, and trigger famines. Ha!

  Goes to show they never understood us. Tried psychoanalytical parlor tricks to explain our growth. They were desperate for any explanation other than the truth: It was God’s will

  Listen to this fool:

  These people are scared. They want a way out—that is all there is to it. They look around and see shortages, unrest, economic and political uncertainty on all sides, and it scares them. But do they pitch in and help? No! They make things worse! They turn to mysticism and embrace practices that exacerbate the very conditions which frighten them. It’s mass insanity, that’s what it is.

  And it’s got to be stopped!

  Senator Henry Mifflin (D-Neb)

  Congressional Record

  See? Never understood. The air is thick now, true, because the productive capacity of the entire race must be strained to the utmost to feed, clothe, and house us all. Food is scarce, yes, but there’s enough to keep us going until the life force reaches the critical point, the signal to God that we are ready to be transported en masse to a higher plane of existence. Even non-believers will be translated to the next plateau. Then they’ll believe.

  Coming soon. I can feel it. We all can.

  (11:48 . . . better keep moving)

  Getting sidetracked here. Let’s see . . . the senator’s remarks make a good lead-in to government attempts to control the Church. Knowing that the Church was doing God’s work, the followers of Satan used the governments of the world to suppress it. Islamic and communist countries were the most successful—they simply outlawed us and that was that. But wherever there was a spark of democracy, we flourished. And once we were able to organize the faithful into voting blocks, no elected official could stand against us for long. Even after we had gained majority power, anti-Procreationist legislation was still introduced, but was consistently defeated when the final vote came around.

  These headlines from some old newsstats ought to be dramatic enough:

  BIRTH CONTROL BILL ABORTED

  New York Daily News

  DEFEAT OF POPULATION CONTROL BILL A CERTAINTY

  President Decries Dementia Sweeping Western World

  New York Times

  I was born three days after that last headline. Government opposition to the Church folded completely during the first five years of my life. By that time, every head of state and virtually every elected official was a Procreationist. Governments of the free world no longer hindered us because we became those governments. Soon, even the inner circles of the communist politburos came under our sway. The Islamic world took longer, but eventually saw the error of its ways, trading Mohammed for Bartholomew. The world was fast becoming Procreationist.

  The media remained a problem for a while longer, probably because they were so full of queers. Queers feared us the most, and with good reason. They knew they were living in defiance of the Divine Imperative: They could not be fruitful and multiply, therefore they were an abomination. They offend God and all those who believe in God. But we soon put them in their proper place.

  A golden age ensued. The Church continued to expand. It was not enough to have most of humanity as members of the Church—we wanted everyone. We inducted new members constantly. Some were reluctant at first, but eventually they saw the Light. Had to. If you weren’t with us, you were most certainly against us. The Divine Imperative was frustrated and the goal delayed by anyone who refused to reproduce.

  A holy time was upon us. There were pockets of resistance—heretics, die-hard reactionaries who refused to change their ways, queers, feminists—but they didn’t last long. All the world was soon one with the Church. Or so I thought.

  Something sinister occurred around my ninth birthday. No one recognized it as a threat then, but looking back now I can see the hand of the Devil.

  This is the earliest report I could find in the library files:

  LEARNING DEVICE TO SEEK MASS MARKET

  London (AP)—Cognition Industries, Ltd., has announced development of a new microcircuit which will make mass distribution of its BioCognitive Learning Unit economically feasible. “It’s a major breakthrough,” said a spokesman for the Sheffield-based corporation. “Ten years from now there won’t be a home without one.”

  New York Times

  The company spokesman was wrong: Nearly every home contained a BioCog unit within five years, attached to the family vid set with up to a dozen headsets plugged in at once at the educational hours.

  After a decade of widespread use, the results were astounding: ten-year-olds doing university-level work, autistic minds reached, brain-damaged kids formerly considered uneducable learning simple math and reading skills. Efforts were made to get BioCog units into as many homes as possible in every corner of the world. A triumphal time for the Church. Not only was the life force growing at an unprecedented rate, but our intellectual powers were increasing beyond our wildest dreams. All for the greater glory of God when He translated us to the next plateau.

  Everyone was on guard, of course, for possible misuse of the BioCog device. Mind control was the big bugaboo at first, but that was proved impossible. On a subtler level, however, there was concern over the device’s potential for influencing attitudes. Stringent laws were passed to assure the faithful that anti-Procreation ideas would never be put into their heads, nor into the heads of their children while they learned.

  All went well until last year . . .

  . . . last year . . .

  Gayle and I produced our fourth life last year, a boy. Still remember how I felt as I cradled him in my arms, knowing I’d helped add a
nother tiny increment to the life force, bringing us all that much closer to our goal . . .

  —sidetracked again. Have to concentrate.

  Last year, by the time of our fourth, the BioCog unit had become a part of our daily lives. Like all devout Procreationists, we were learning all we could before Translation, to be better prepared for whatever the next plateau might bring. The educational programs were all uniformly effective. And uniformly dull.

  Then The Bobby & Laura Show made its debut on the late-night vid.

  (11:55still some time left)

  Warm in here . . . palms sweaty . . .

  The show was controversial from the start. A young couple—Laura, a sweet-looking blonde, Bobby darkly virile, both looking mid-twentyish and dressed in light blue kimonos—had been given an hour to explore methods of enhancing the emotional and physical responses of the procreational act. Discussion would take up the first half of the show; the final half would involve a demonstration via the BioCog unit.

  Don’t quite recall the details of the discussion that premier night, but the demonstration was unforgettable. I remember the screen dimming as we were instructed to don our headsets. Could see vague shapes of Bobby and Laura disrobing. Then the shapes came together and my body was electrified. Could almost feel Laura’s hands on me. Sensations built slowly to a crescendo that was almost unbearable, leaving me weak and limp afterward. I remember turning to Gayle to find her staring at me with an odd expression on her face—she hadn’t put her headset on.

  Tried to explain it to her. Tried to convey the sensual and emotional warmth that flooded through me, but she just made a face and said it didn’t seem right. Took her in my arms right then and showed her how right it was.

  Gayle was hardly unique in her doubts about the propriety of the show. Many members of the Church felt there was something scandalous about it. The ensuing investigation revealed that Bobby and Laura were orthodox Procreationists with three lives—a little girl and a set of twin boys—to their credit. Their stated purpose was advancement of Church teachings into new areas. They wanted to explore all the roads of the procreational process in order to follow better the Divine Imperative. They had experimented and had discovered that the BioCog units could influence more than the cognitive areas of the brain, so they were employing the unit’s abilities in the emotional and sensual areas as an educational adjunct to their discussions.