But prayer, although I kept recommending it to others, had never counted among my own spiritual gifts. Even as a creature of faith, I fell victim to thoughts of the city outside the chapterhouse, imagining its amusements and temptations—from the aesthetic to the carnal, from the noble to the base. The summoner on my bedtable had keys for food, research aid, and the referencing of millions of sites, activities, and services planetwide. It also allowed me to set the coordinates for the screen on which the unit showed these items. I enlarged or shrank the screen, shifted it in amoeboid swoops from wall to ceiling, and dimmed or brightened it, wholly on whim, perching at the end of my bed to watch the wall or lying supine to see the strange shenanigans on the ceiling.
The screen showed me that Ganhk had crooneries (singing bistros); stairway museums; falconing tournaments; concert walks; neurotheaters; disembodiment booths; pornoporia; cafés specializing in offworld cuisines; wet-, hard-, and software shops; greenhouses; costume boutiques; lock kayaking; and roving street shrinks, among hundreds of other lures, kicks, and helps, including even a daily fishing meet on the Kivit.
I wanted to go out with a friend. I didn’t want to sit like a prisoner in this resort for alien invalids trying to pray—meditate—myself to an acceptance of my soulectomy. But I was a lutemaker from a hamlet in an emerging backwater nation on the far edge of the civilized iduum and lacked the balls to try a midnight escape.
My final sessions with Dr. Garer began early the following morning in a revolving aerie atop the chapterhouse. The view gave me God feelings, not so much of power as of awe. Dr. Garer pointed out various places and eventually diverted my attention to the red-slate ramparts west of us.
“My own village, Iiol, lies beyond those mountains,” she told me. “We call them the Bloodbones.”
“You hail from a mere hamlet, just as I do, and yet you came to adulthood with no spiritual training?”
“The notion that matters of the spirit belong only to those formally indoctrinated in a ritualized faith is as false as the idea that a religionist lacks intellect,” Dr. Garer said with a trace of heat. More calmly, she added, “I don’t feel estranged from creation because I deny a quasipersonal creator. Neither will you, Drei, after the procedure.”
I said, “How exactly do you regard God?”
“As a concept, not a personality. A metaphor, not a lord to whom self-abasement is due. If I sometimes think of God in a backward or oldfangled way, I attribute it to the stress of a bad specific moment or the firing of synapses in my reptilian hindbrain. And I go on functioning as a human grown-up in synch with the rhythms of Doen as one living world amid a vast galaxy of sentient worlds.”
“Whereas I don’t?”
“I don’t know, Drei. Most religionists—although not all—get stuck in a narrow sacral system based on an analogy with the parent-child dynamic of our own biology, itself a product of evolutionary forces. Think how arbitrary that is. And how limiting.”
I gazed out at the minarets and retorts of the city. A lutemaker could follow this argument and even credit it to a degree, but it denied the possibility that God may have shaped the so-called parent-child dynamic on the narrow sacral system defining the God-human relationship. However, the mere thought of explaining this to Dr. Garer fatigued me.
“Tell me about the procedure,” I said. “My procedure.”
Dr. Garer used a video screen and an electronic pointer to show me the odd structure (the word growth exaggerates the size and the changeability of such a minuscule tumor) triggering and feeding my faith. It was more like a nit-sized speck than a nodule, more like a piece of gristle than a cyst. It grew on the interior of my left lung, very near the heart. From it radiated—if only on the 3-D raychart—a targetlike aura of yellow and flame. The rings about the bud of my faith were many times larger than the tiny bull’s-eye at their center.
“Air and blood,” I said, fastening on the tumor’s proximity to both lungs and heart.
“You’re remarking on its location,” Dr. Garer said. “That’s fine. Except that after Dr. Uten Venlet developed his original theographic techniques, he discovered that the structure popped up in different places in different patients, from the cerebral cortex to the genitals. Last year, I found one behind the knee of a sullen Kozlukti nun.”
“If she’d had her leg amputated,” I said as a tease, “would she still’ve needed your procedure?”
“Oddly, yes. The structure has latent subsidiaries that may crop up almost anywhere.”
“Then how can your procedure truly rid anyone of faith?”
“By its thoroughness. Also, we never perform it without intense before and after counseling.”
“Like this?”
“Like this,” she said.
Looking down, I saw naked children thrashing in a lock of the Kivit River, in a nook of the banking complex, under a tree with boughs like huge beige culverts and leaves like tattered green scrolls. Nearby, adults cast lines into the water and extracted on bronze lures river creatures more like featherless birds than trout.
“So when do I have it?” I said.
“Day after tomorrow, if you keep making progress. Do you still want it?”
“I think so. One favor, though.”
“What’s that?”
“An evening out with a fellow Corderist. You’ve separated us, I think, to insure our biddability as converts.”
“I’m sorry, Drei. That just isn’t so.”
“Then let me see her this evening.”
“Who?”
“Zarafise Koh.” Another evening under chapterhouse arrest, I added, would drive me crazy.
“I’m glad to agree,” Dr. Garer said. “And maybe tomorrow you and Citizen Koh will visit my homeplace in Iiol.”
My eyes betrayed my suspicion.
“To prove we don’t keep you confined to some evil end,” she said. “To show how one devoid from birth of God possession can live, and live richly.”
That evening, Zarafise and I strolled through Ganhk. We rented lines, sonic spinners, and a small Kivit pool under a moonlamp. Here we angled for a type of Doenr river life called goldfinch. This name, the rental man said, was a pun, albeit one opaque to us. The water, though, had an ebony depth allowing blurred vision to the bottom: fins, wings, flukes, streamers, eyespots, scales, maybe even slippery vestigial feet. Zarafise had an earache and a blister inside her lip. The earache stemmed from her body’s failure to adjust to local gravity and barometric pressure, the blister from worry.
“What is it?” I said.
“I’m refusing the procedure,” she said. “You should too.”
“Why?” (Here we went again.)
“If this structure exists in us, there’s a reason. Cutting it out is an evil intervention.”
“Name the reason for the appendix. Or the tailbone. Or my own useless extra nipple.” To shock her out of her inflexible piety, I pulled up my tunic and drew an invisible circle around a wen on my so-called milkline. Zarafise slapped my hand down.
“Stop that!”
“People here swim naked,” I said. “I doubt a blemish on my skinny flank will offend them.”
Zarafise cast her line and quickly pulled in a goldfinch, which glittered as if with hammered coins. I helped land, unhook, and release it, putting her three catches up on me.
“What will you do?” I said.
Zarafise, once she had made up her mind, rarely recanted a decision. “Begin working off the cost of my error. I have a job in the chapterhouse.”
“A job a machine could do better,” I said. “It’ll take you years to pay off your debt.”
“As I work, I’ll testify. This was the Ladlamb’s plan for me from the beginning.”
“Sagence tolerates but doesn’t encourage the God-stricken,” I said. “You’ll have a hard time here.”
“I’ve known harder times in harder places.”
We left the banks of the Kivit for another stroll, this time to gawk numbly at the city’s architecture, a mélan
ge of functionalism and fantasy, serviceable rectangular structures wedged amongst the tall sinuous bottles so conspicuous from the spaceport. The light of seven moons twinkled from or leaked through the city’s pastel bridgeways, domes, and spires. Many pedestrians wore polarized eyeglasses.
“No churches,” said Zarafise Koh. “No cathedrals.”
“Did you really expect any?”
“Not even their gutted shells. At least on a world with a bona fide history, Drei, you get their petrified remains.”
“Other structures stand in for them.”
“Like what?”
“Hospitals,” I said. “Art galleries. Chanceries.”
“The sick die hopeless, the pictures lack substance, the ceremonies ring hollow.”
“That’s the bias of a zealot,” I said. “Ganhk strikes me as joyous, alive.”
“You don’t need the procedure,” Zarafise said. “Dr. Garer has already performed it on you.”
Not so. But our counseling sessions and my recent exposure to Ganhk’s charms had prompted me to defend the place.
“I’ve had enough,” Zarafise Koh said.
I took her back to the chapterhouse in which she’d spurned her role as patient for the roles of an indentured servant and a secret agent for the Ladlamb. Then I returned to the Kivit (rejecting prayer much as Zarafise had rejected the procedure) and had a strip of broiled goldfinch with a mug of Sagency mead. I had thought to debauch myself in one or two of Ganhk’s pleasure spots, but that raw urge had flown and I hiked back to my chapterhouse well before midnight.
The next day Pinalat Garer and I traveled by magnetrain to Iiol. She wore sandals, a voluted blue wrapsuit, and a wide snood in which her iron-hued hair swung gently. Sitting beside her as our train hummed through a cut in the Bloodbones, I felt like a truant schoolboy.
It rained as we hurtled along. Somewhere toward the front of our car, a young man crooned: “This magnetrain Calls the magnet rain, And all who deign To drink it again Have surcease of pain On their travels amain!”
I liked this man’s tenor and longed to accompany him on a lute of my own making. His song had three more stanzas, none very original or cogent, but his voice transfigured them. I heard the sacred in that voice. Dr. Garer tapped her knee, but probably heard only his lilting tenor, the swift schussing of the train, a billion ricocheting raindrops.
In Iiol, we walked in this downpour through an orchard of toadstool-shaped treehouses to Pinalat Garer’s girlhood home, where her father and mother still lived: Girmisur and Dulatod Garer, old Sagency with frank eyes and straight backs, dressed for our arrival in silken capes and culottes.
They greeted us, gave us bread, soup, and ale, and withdrew up a helical wooden staircase to a loft in the cap of their house. Thick forest grew about, but among the trees were other such houses. Iiol itself tumbled down the hillside below, an array of shingled shops and kiosks.
“This is my room,” Dr. Garer said, pointing me to a chair.
By her room, she meant not merely a dormitory but a living space redolent of her personality. It boasted paintings, toys, paperweights, a dulcimet, books, slate sculptures, holograms, rainstaves: items that had helped formulate or that currently amused her adult self. These things—not so much things as precious totems—shut out the outside world without turning the room itself into a prison cell.
“Cozy,” I said. “A kind of shrine to you.”
“Far from it,” Dr. Garer said. “Shrines mummify and honor, but this place gives me a kick in the seat.”
“Your parents don’t use it while you’re in the city?”
“Yes, they do, but they try to keep it neat for me.”
“They idolize you.”
“Again, far from it. They respect me for who I am and what I’ve done. I’m their posterity, as my work is mine.”
“Dying holds neither terror nor hope for you.”
“The act of dying holds terror for me, especially if it occurs away from help. But being dead? That’s nothing.”
“What hope in utter nonexistence?”
“Perfect peace,” said Dr. Garer. “Why would anybody want the turmoil of hell or the boredom of your Corderist heaven?”
I stayed mute. In fact, I could not envision an afterlife, although God, as drover and deliverer, still seemed to me not only an option but also a prerequisite. I didn’t want my First One to stand in that capacity, though, especially if my conviction on that point convicted me of foolishness or delusion among my freethinking peers. Zarafise Koh did not feel that way, of course, but she would spend the remainder of her life a captive of her Corderism and a servant of the Sagency.
“Take a walk or a nap,” Dr. Garer said. “Do as you like.”
A soft rain still fell, so I stayed indoors flirting with a nap. Pinalat Garer moved about quietly. At length she took up her dulcimet, to play the song of the man on the magnetrain. Music filled the study, drenching me in warm impalpable light.
Lightning blasted the toadstool house nearest the Garers’ or, rather, the antenna atop it. A crack of thunder concussed the air and the trees, rattling the house’s windows. The air glowed. The hair on my arms did a brief writhing dance. Iiol was not Ganhk, nor Ganhk Iiol, and suddenly the lucidism of the city felt fragile and remote.
From the Garers’ loft, a cry: “O storm storm storm!”
“Shhhhhh,” someone hissed. “Shhhhh.”
Pinalat Garer and I stepped from her room to look up the staircase. Girmisur Garer came pounding down it. He had shed his cape and hiked up his emerald-green culottes. His dugs swung on his chest like heavy ivory balloons. Blue veins and red streaks marbled his flesh, which jounced as he landed on his big ugly feet at the bottom.
Dr. Garer rushed over and took her father by the shoulders: “Chaba, it’s only a thunderstorm. Steady yourself.”
“I know,” he said. However, he didn’t seem to care. The whites of his eyes had the size and the plushness of meringues.
“Go back upstairs, Chaba. Put on your cape.”
Thunder spoke again, grumbling above Iiol like an air force of giant saurians. The woods quaked, as did Iiol and the sunset side of the Bloodbones.
Cried Girmisur: “O storm storm storm!” He stripped off his culottes and darted outside in only a loincloth.
“Girmisur!” called Dulatod. “Girmisur!”
“Stay here, Mezi,” Dr. Garer said. “We’ll get him.”
Girmisur preceded us into an evergreen thicket, heedless of strewn cones and needles. He broke off two branches thick with gum and held us at bay, flapping them menacingly.
“Chaba, lay the branches down. Come back inside.”
He ignored Dr. Garer and trotted up the hillside between toadstool houses and trees onto an apron of scree that rose on a long slope to the peak. Trotting, he brandished his fronds and struggled to stay upright. Amazingly, three other geezers from Iiol, one baby-naked but skeletal, had reached the scree and started up it carrying branches. Eventually, Girmisur and they reached a ridge-line of crimson slate and stood on it four abreast, staring down at us with awe-stricken eyes.
“Who are they?” I said. “What’re they doing?”
“A raindance,” Dr. Garer said. “They’re educated rustics like my chaba. They understand their folly, God forgive them.”
Naked or nearly naked, Girmisur and his friends looked like elderly chimps in the throes of an elemental madness. Each thundercrack provoked them. Girmisur or another rushed partway down the slope, toppled, cut himself, and struggled back up to the ridge-line, where the other old men flailed away at him with their branches. The rain and the din drove them, sustaining a frenzy that seemed both to embarrass and to offend Dr. Garer.
“Shouldn’t we go after him?” I said.
“No.” Pinalat Garer gripped my wrist. “To go up there is to buy into that nonsense.”
“I feel helpless watching.” Which I did. One of the men had bloody gashes on his forehead and knee.
“You could p
ray,” Dr. Garer said.
I looked at her, not knowing if she meant this as a rebuke or as permission. So I prayed silently that Girmisur Garer and his friends be spared harm from the storm’s fury and their own unseemly fits.
Instead of calming down, the old men began to hoot, jumping about and swinging their fronds even more violently. Dr. Garer grimaced and hugged herself. I stood beside her, miserable in my strangerhood and futility.
The acquaintances or families of some of the other old men joined us under the screeline. Dr. Garer nodded at them, and they at us. Then everyone waited in the rain and lightning for the revelers to abandon their frenzy and rejoin us. At length, they did, but Girmisur last of all. Dr. Garer and I climbed through the gravel to meet him and escorted him to the house. Dulatod greeted us with towels and hot fragrant drinks.
“Put him to bed,” Pinalat Garer told her mother.
“It doesn’t happen that often anymore,” Dulatod said. “Not in ages, and we’ve had other storms.”
“I enjoyed it!” Girmisur said. “It was exhilarating! It was—!” He smiled, a faraway cast to his eyes.
I wondered if my prayer had helped bring him down without injury. Probably not. After all, the other waiting Iiolr had taken their crazy chabas or grandchabas home without benefit of prayer, and one old man had hurt himself quite badly. Girmisur went to bed—in a room behind the kitchen—and that was the last I saw of him during my stay in Iiol. Dulatod returned to Dr. Garer’s study and apologized for Girmisue’s antic fit and my soaking when I tried to help him.
“I didn’t mind,” I said truthfully.
Mother and daughter looked at each other, and Dulatod said, “Forgive him, Pinalat. He can’t help himself.”
“Why can’t he?” Dr. Garer rubbed her hair with a towel. “All my tests clearly show he lacks an enthusiast node. He’s never had one.”
“It’s chemical,” Dulatod said. “Chemical, chimerical, and chimpanic.” She grinned. Her grin expanded into a smile. Her smile progressed to laughter.
“If he once saw himself, he’d desist forever,” Dr. Garer said, also laughing.
“Forever,” said Dulatod.
Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories Page 33