“Society of Jesus.” Father Fahey’s pupils glittered like bits of obsidian. “Why? What did you think they stood for?”
“I couldn’t have said. Do you happen to know Sylvester Jowell?”
“No, I don’t. Interesting name, though.”
“Interesting initials, too.”
“I suppose so. Did his initials lead you to assume a connection between him and us Jesuits?” Without asking, Father Fahey sat beside Lingenfelter on his narrow cot and gripped his knee. “Because we don’t know him. We’ve never known him. His opinions distress us. His motives defy our comprehension.” The grip on Lingenfelter’s knee grew more insistent, as painful as the flexion of a raptor’s talons. Father Fahey’s pupils—his dark-brown irises, for that matter—abruptly clouded, as if someone had pressed disks of smoked glass over them. “Shhh,” he said. “Don’t cry out. Love is the Devil, but silence gets all manner of wickedness done.”
From one cassock sleeve Father Fahey pulled a wooden ruler with a thin copper edge and some sort of writing implement. From the other he extracted a switchblade that Lingenfelter dimly associated with the Cross …
Heather Farris perched at Lingenfelter’s bedside in Henry Grady Memorial Hospital. For twenty minutes she had apologized for ratting him out to the police after identifying Sylvester Jowell to him as the Squawk Jock. She apologized for failing to heed Ernie Salter’s notification of his arrest. She apologized for the peculiar wounds that the priest had inflicted upon him in a fugue of profound enthrallment after cajoling his way into Lingenfelter’s cell. As Heather spoke, the mole on her jaw occupied almost all his attention.
Apparently, Father Fahey had placed the wooden ruler across Lingenfelter’s windpipe until Lingenfelter blacked out. Then he had measured the cell’s dimensions in feet and inches. He wrote the length, height, and breadth of the cage on its rear wall in bright pearl-gray numerals. Then he placed Lingenfelter on the floor, cut away his shirt, and used the switchblade to gouge four star-shaped badges of flesh out of his torso. He was bent over Lingenfelter carving a fifth star into his chest, right above the heart, when the police broke in and seized him. If the cuts had gone much deeper, Lingenfelter would not have awakened.
Heather said, “You don’t know how glad I was to see your eyes open, Harry.”
Lingenfelter nodded. He wondered how Diego Fahey, S. J., had read his mind. He wondered if capturing and subduing the priest, whom Heather said had no memory of assaulting him, would put an end to the squawk murders. He feared the opposite. If the real agency behind the slayings could inspire new killers with epigrammatic thoughts out of the mental ether, the bizarre assaults would go on. Fahey struck Lingenfelter as a mere cat’s-paw whom Sylvester Jowell had felled by channeling and focusing the destructive essence of innumerable malign squawks, brilliant and banal.
The ruler across Lingenfelter’s throat had rendered him temporarily mute. He knew this without even trying to talk. Heather detected his agitation and handed him a notepad and a pen. He worked to position them properly and then scratched out on the pad’s top sheet: What’s happened to Jowell?
“He’s disappeared,” Heather said. “I think he knew that Diego Fahey, S. J., had outlived his usefulness. What serial killer in his cunning right mind attempts a murder in a locked jail cell?”
No one knew where Jowell had gone, but Heather had an idea. The Francis Bacon exhibit at the High closed tomorrow and moved across country to a museum—Heather could not remember its name—in the San Francisco Bay Area. This fact struck her as suggestive. Lingenfelter pondered it for about thirty seconds and then scrawled a message on his notepad: Need to rest.
Although his doctors had advised him not to, on Sunday Lingenfelter attended Chick Morrow’s funeral. He sat with Lorna Riley in a pew reserved for close friends of the deceased, but he could not stop thinking of a melancholy Lily Tomlin observation: “We’re all in this alone.” So far as Lingenfelter knew, no one had ever ripped off this clever remark and submitted it to “The Squawk Box.”
The young priest officiating at the service did his earnest best to contradict both this unspoken sentiment and the artist Francis Bacon’s love affair with portraits of caged and screaming popes. He exuded humility and calm. Some of his serenity passed into Lingenfelter. After all, Chick Morrow had considered Lingenfelter a friend, Lorna Riley had invited him to come, and not one mourner looked at him as if his presence in any way profaned these rites.
An alien thought—a squawklike saying—struggled to rise into Lingenfelter’s consciousness. He could tell by its alien edge that it had originated elsewhere—in the troubled, alcoholic depths of Francis Bacon’s own personality, in fact. At length he had this terrible epigram firm and entire in his head: “I always think of friendship as where two people can really tear each other to pieces.” Lingenfelter’s mouth opened in awe and horror.
Lorna Riley nudged him and whispered, “What’s wrong, Harry?”
Lingenfelter tried to tell her, but all that he heard escaping his lips was a hideous, inarticulate squawk.
Sequel on Skorpiós
i
YESHUA HAS DIED, AN OLD MAN WITH TANGLED NOSE hairs and rotten teeth. I place two of Caesar’s denarii on his eyes, to blind his death-stare. Soon, in this Ionian island’s fierce heat, his body will release the first odors of its corruption.
Many people believe that Yeshua died forty years ago on a cross on Skull Mount outside Jerusalem. Many others believe that two days later he rose from his tomb, not as a ghost but as a death-changed cutting of God’s selfsame vine. In truth, Yeshua did not die on that cross, and so had no call to come alive again. Our plot entailed bribing two Roman soldiers and so much risk to so many others that even now I marvel that we accomplished it.
In our hovel on Skorpiós, the dead Yeshua hardly resembles the young rabbi whom the soldiers scourged that day, pressing a mock crown onto his head and scarring his back with flails. The crown’s thorns and those flails dripped with an opiate I had boiled out of a wilderness lichen. This substance helped Yeshua endure the pain of crucifixion and lapse by the gradual slowing of his heart into a limpness akin to death.
One bribed soldier argued against breaking Yeshua’s legs. “He’s gone,” he said. “Why waste more effort on him?” When another legionary crowed, “For the fun of it,” our soldier, to stymie a worse assault, stabbed Yeshua under the ribs with his spear, delivering another dose of opiate. This sustained his deathlike slumber until Sunday morning.
But on Friday evening, Joseph of Arimathea came with an ox cart and several women to Skull Mount, to take Yeshua from the cross. I also came, in woman’s garb, and wrestled him into the cart. Later, I carried him into the garden tomb. After I laid him out there, Mary, Mary of Magdala, and Joanna massaged his body with spices and bound him in clean linen strips.
Tonight Yeshua’s aged corpse has none of his younger self’s poignant beauty. (What foolishness, attempting to reform the corrupt Judean religion by shamming a death and a return!) In its fleeing slumber, his crucified body had appeared ready to soar out of itself on viewless wings. How did so lovely a man dwindle into this grizzled wreck?
In this wise:
On that long-ago Sunday, Joseph and I crept into the tomb through a hidden tunnel. When Yeshua awoke, we unwrapped his body, robed him, and led him back out to a juniper grove several hundred paces away. From there, Yeshua fled, at length reaching Nazareth in Galilee. Meanwhile, some soldiers moved the tomb’s stone (for a rumor had spread, that someone would steal the body) and found nothing inside but Yeshua’s discarded wrappings.
Later, on a Galilean mountain where the rabbi had given his most famous sermon, we feigned a resurrection event. Even more people believed. When the Romans came to investigate, Yeshua and I hiked to Tyre and boarded a Greek merchant ship, yielding the preaching of his gospel to an army of beloved dupes.
ii
Cephas, the brothers Boanerges, the man once named Saul, and many others carried our false go
od tidings (believing them implicitly) to the Gentiles, to every major city on the jagged northern shore of the Middle Sea. Soon, colonies of Christ followers pocked the coastlands, suffering the scorn of pagan neighbors but infecting many others with belief. Yeshua, whom some of these evangels would have recognized even in disguise, avoided his old comrades.
We settled in a small village on Skorpiós. I made and sold rare medicines. Yeshua carpentered or fished. He nearly undid us, though, by urging baptism on amazed pagans and casting his cryptic parables before them like pearls.
And then a fishing accident left Yeshua unable to move any body part but his eyes. If God had chosen Yeshua (as Yeshua had always said, even during our Passover ruse), why had this paralyzing injury befallen him? I could not believe that God would so cruelly humble his anointed son, but my affection for Yeshua led me to serve him as physician and slave. I fed and cleaned him, turned him to keep him from growing pallet sores. Beyond assisting in his lie, though, what had I done to render myself this imposter’s keeper?
Observing me at work, an islander asked me why I did not abandon Yeshua and return to Palestine. I recalled Yeshua’s admonitions to visit the sick, to go to the prisoner, and I stayed. The plealess dignity of his gaze also spoke to me. Heal yourself, I silently begged him. Meanwhile, my ministry to him stretched into years. Often I prayed that he would die. His eyes, though, kept me from denying him food, or the solacing rubdown, or the occasional clumsy story.
Travelers to our village sometimes told me of the spread throughout Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy of a queer Judean sect trumpeting a savior who had died but who now lived again as an emblem of eternal hope. I said nothing in contradiction, even though the savior himself, eating and eliminating, mocked this hope every time I rubbed ointment on his sores or added fresh ticking to his pallet. My faith in the man had died long ago, even before the accident at sea.
iii
This morning, in his seventy-third or -fourth year, long after most other chronic invalids have passed on, Yeshua in fact died. I have leisure to write. The dead do not rise. Even worse, God does not preside.
Yeshua’s corpse, its aroma unbearably high, sits propped against the parapet in mute witness to God’s silence. I should bury the man, but the act has no urgency for me, even in this heat. Does it matter that our lives have no follow-on, that we sleep rather than soar? Tonight, as Yeshua’s corruption rises, mere oblivion seems a gift.
iv
God forgive me, I burned him on the beach. I made an oven of stones and torched his tenantless body. The smoke climbed both sweet and foul into the evening sky. His skull failed to burn. More disturbing to me, so did his heart.
If only in the here and now we have hope in Yeshua, we who loved him constitute the most pitiable people on earth—as I, a slave in bondage to a lie partly of my own devising, have known for years. And now
Coda
Yeshua has appeared to me. Without even opening a door, he stood before the table in my hovel cupping his unburnt heart in his hands. He laid the heart on my table. He looked like an old man, but an old man in perfect health with a strange bronze nimbus about him. He said to me, after years of invalid muteness, “Congratulations, Lebbeus,” and vanished as startlingly as he had come.
I do not know what this means. But Yeshua’s heart still rests on my table, and I did not visit the beach to fetch it here. (Nor have I gone mad, like those from whom Yeshua once evicted demons.) Meanwhile, his heart smells sweet, less like braised flesh than new roses, and what I begin to know is that I must open my own to its fragrance.
Murder on Lupozny Station with Gerald W. Page
A LIVE, THE MAN HAD UNDOUBTEDLY INTIMIDATED his subordinates—a heavy-browed colossus of a stationmaster, with a muscular upper torso and hands like iron pincers. Now he lay face-down on the floor of his private quarters aboard Lupozny Station, light-years from the “civilized” worlds of the Ecumos Confederacy. The blood that had spilled across the floor from the wound near his heart put me in mind of cooling lava, for the emotional vulcanism that had powered Frederick Lupozny’s life seemed far from extinguished. In falling and lurching forward, his second-in-command had discovered, the stationmaster had bent the haft of the knife that his unknown assailant had plunged into him. His right hand, meanwhile, was still outstretched toward an object that lay only centimeters from his fingertips: a small, old-fashioned telescope.
Two hours ago, summoned from the aft astrogational room, Chaish Qu’chosh and I had set eyes on Lupozny Station for the first time. We had seen it from the positive-space conning module of the light-skater E.C.S. Baidarka, of which my tall alien dyadmate and I were then new crew members. This ship, under our guidance, had just emerged from the medium of faster-than-light travel that veteran skaters refer to as Black Ice; and there on our forward screens, glowing against the inky backdrop of normal space like so many incandescent coals and flinders, were the central cylinder, and the closely orbiting storage canisters of Lupozny Station.
Those canisters, Captain Ishmaela Sang told us, housed the nickel, iron, molybdenum, and various other ores dug by Lupozny’s miners from the errant asteroids constituting the entire solar retinue of Anless 32, a small and lukewarm star. It was this ore that the Baidarka had come to pick up and to haul back to the Twin Ruby system and the factory world of Greater Bethlehem. But, by a coincidence which Captain Sang deplored, we had arrived at the station an hour or so after an unfortunate incident that would probably delay our enterprise.
“Someone over there has murdered the stationmaster,” Captain Sang said, swiveling distractedly in her conning chair. “The facility’s second-in-command, a man named Sinclair Toombs, wants an impartial party from the Baidarka to evaluate the matter. He thinks he’s found the murderer, but until he has the support of a disinterested outsider or two, he’s not going to rest easy. Ecumos is likely to view everyone over there as a suspect, and Toombs is anxious for the heat to be off. He wants you to begin.”
“Us?” I said, looking warily to Chaish Qu’chosh.
“Why not, Mr. Detchemendy?” Captain Sang replied, ceasing to swivel. “Have you no faith in your powers? Chaish and you are an astrogational dyad, the Baidarka’s skategrace.”
“But this was our first actual—”
“No matter,” Captain Sang interrupted me. “Your judgments, once shared and reconciled, give you an advantage over mere human and chode mortals. Or should.” She smiled slyly. “Go over to Lupozny Station and help poor Toombs.”
Chaish and I exchanged a glance. A dance of phosphenes—“stars,” say human beings who see them after receiving a blow to the head—told me that Chaish Qu’chosh had triggered them in my brain and retinas by means of an electromagnetic emission similar to those used by electric eels as a sense system. I nodded at Chaish, bowed to Captain Sang, and led my towering dyadmate out of the conning module to the Baidarka’s spaceboat bay.
**Murder?** Chaish signaled me. **One of your kind has killed—taken the life of—another member of your species?**
Preoccupied, I didn’t reply.
But let me explain: The chode purposely trigger phosphene patterns in one another’s optical fields. These quasi-visual phenomena, in fact, constitute their “language,” and their people have distinguished among forty-eight different naturally occurring or electromagnetically provokable categories of phosphenes (more than three times the number originally detected by human researchers): quivering plaids, translucent snowflake characters, pinwheels, complicated moiré effects. For all of these the chode have either assigned specific meanings or deduced certain absolute innate meanings. In human circles, in fact, some say that their people are busily working out the secret code of the cosmos itself. Maybe. Maybe not. During our dyadship, Chaish never made any claim to Ultimate Knowledge, and it may have been my imagination leading me to suspect that she was remorselessly on its trail.
During the three Earth-standard years in which Chaish Qu’chosh and Raymond Detchemendy trained to be dy
admates, her human partner learned the complex symbology of the phosphenes she transmitted; she, in turn, learned the phonetic patterns of three different human languages. Her task was the more difficult. Chode from widely separated regions of their home world—which human beings call Voshlai, in the Suhail system—are instantly able to communicate, unless physiologically or emotionally powerless to trigger phosphenes in others, an extremely rare disability. The meanings of phosphene patterns are universal on Voshlai, and even the blind among the chode are able to see and interpret them—for their “language,” although often stimulated from without, originates from within. Human beings, I should add, can see phosphenes by closing their eyes and vigorously but carefully rubbing their eyeballs.
“Chaish Qu’chosh,” by the way, is an arbitrary phonetic transliteration of the phosphene pattern by which my dyadmate invariably referred to herself. Assigning different sound values to the characters comprising her name, we could just as easily call her “Pob Ra’pib” or “Blej Lu’blaij.”
In a matter of minutes our spaceboat closed the distance between the Baidarka and Lupozny Station, which orbits Anless 32 almost at the outer edge of that star’s feeble gravitational influence. The system’s ore-bearing asteroids inscribe their crazy ellipses much closer in, darting like mercurial fish.
As Captain Sang had said, Chaish and I were a skategrace. We had just brought an interstellar vessel across Black Ice for the first time in our joint career, only to find that Frederick Lupozny’s murder had upstaged our performance. No chance to celebrate our accomplishment. Of course, had we failed, the Baidarka would have been frozen forever in The Ice.
A dyad skategrace is the soul of a faster-than-light vessel. Early on, when ships were first tentatively easing themselves out of positive space into the translight regions, their crews fell into a state of unconsciousness akin to death. Only ships whose contingents had a particularly quick-thinking captain, or crew members less immediately susceptible to the siren song of The Ice, were able to return. Therefore, interstellar travel took place at sublight speeds and “skating” remained an untested theoretical possibility—except, of course, by a few stalwart or addlepated captains who risked everything for a breakthrough.
Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Page 12