Alternate Heroes

by Gregory Benford

  Sometimes he crafted a hymn line by line, word by word, fighting against stubborn ink and papyrus until the song had the shape he wanted. He was proud of the songs he shaped that way. They were truly his.

  Sometimes, though, it was as if he saw the entire shape of a hymn complete at once. Then the praises to the Lord seemed almost to write themselves, his pen racing over the page as an instrument not of his own intelligence but rather a channel through which God spoke for himself. Those hymns were the ones for which the monk had gained a reputation that reached beyond Syria. He often wondered if he had earned it. God deserved more credit than he did. But then, he would remind himself, that was true in all things.

  This idea he had now was of the second sort, a flash of inspiration so blinding that he staggered and almost fell, unable to bear up under its impact. For a moment, he did not even know—or care—where he was. The words, the glorious words reverberating in his mind, were all that mattered.

  And yet, because the inspiration came to him in his native language, his intelligence was also engaged. How could he put his thoughts into words his fellows here and folk all through the Empire would understand? He knew he had to; God would never forgive him, nor he forgive himself, if he failed here.

  The refectory was dark but, filled with summer air and sweating monks, not cool. The monk took a loaf and a cup of wine. He ate without tasting what he had eaten. His comrades spoke to him; he did not answer. His gaze was inward, fixed on something he alone could see.

  Suddenly he rose and burst out, “There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His Son!” That said what he wanted to say, and said it in good Greek, though without the almost hypnotic intensity the phrase had in his native tongue. Still, he saw, it served his purpose: several monks glanced his way, and a couple, having heard only the bare beginning of the song, made the sacred sign of the cross.

  He noticed the others in the refectory only peripherally. Only later would he realize he had heard John say in awe to the abbot Isaac, “The holy fit has taken him again.”

  For the prior was right. The fit had taken him, and more strongly than ever before. Words poured from somewhere deep within him: “He is the Kindly, the Merciful, Who gave His only begotten Son that man might live. The Lord will abide forever in glory, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Which of the Lord’s blessings would you deny?”

  On and on he sang. The tiny part of him not engaged in singing thanked God for granting him what almost amounted to the gift of tongues. His spoken Greek, especially when dealing with things of the world, was sometimes halting. Yet again and again now, he found the words he needed. That had happened before, but never like this.

  “There is no God but the Lord, and Christ is His Son!” Ending as he had begun, the monk paused, looking around for a moment as he slowly came back to himself. His knees failed him; he sank back to his bench. He felt drained but triumphant. The only comparison he knew was most unmonastic: he felt as he had just after a woman.

  He rarely thought, these days, of the wife he had left with all else when he gave over the world for the monastery. He wondered if she still lived; she was a good deal older than he. With very human vanity, he wondered if she ever thought of him. With his own characteristic honesty, he doubted it. The marriage had been arranged. It was not her first. Likely it would not have been her last, either.

  The touch of the prior’s hand on his arm brought him fully back to the confines he had chosen as his own. “That was most marvelous,” John said. “I count myself fortunate to have heard it.”

  The monk dipped his head in humility. “You are too kind, reverend sir.”

  “I do not think so.” John hesitated, went on anxiously, “I trust—I pray—you will be able to write down your words, so those not lucky enough to have been here on this day will yet be able to hear the truth and grandeur of which you sang.”

  The monk laughed—again, he thought, as he might have at any small thing after going in unto his wife. “Have no fear there, reverend sir. The words I recited are inscribed upon my heart. They shall not flee me.”

  “May it be as you have said,” the prior told him.

  John did not, however, sound as though he thought it was. To set his mind at ease, the monk sang the new hymn again, this time not in the hot flush of creation but as one who brings out an old and long-familiar song. “You see, reverend sir,” he said when he was done. “What the Lord, the Most Bountiful One, has granted me shall not be lost. ”

  “Now I have been present at two miracles,” John said, crossing himself: “hearing your song the first time and then, a moment later, again with not one single change, not a different word, that I noticed.”

  With his mind, the monk felt of the texture of his creation, comparing his first and second renditions of the hymn. “There were none,” he said confidently. “I would take oath to it before Christ the Judge of all.”

  “No need on my account. I believe you,” John said. “Still, even miracles, I suppose, may be stretched too far. Therefore I charge you, go at once to the writing chamber, and do not leave it until you have written out three copies of your hymn. Keep one yourself, give me one, and give the third to any other one of the brethren you choose.”

  For the first time in his life, the monk dared protest his prior’s command. “But, reverend sir, I should not waste so much time away from the work of preparing for our journey to the city.”

  “One monk’s absence will not matter so much there,” John said firmly. “Do as I tell you, and we will bring to Constantinople not only our humble selves, but also a treasure for all time in your words of wisdom and prayer. That is why I bade you write out three copies: if the worst befall and the Persians overrun us, which God prevent, then one might still reach the city. And one must, I think. These words are too important to be lost.”

  The monk yielded. “It shall be as you say, then. I had not thought on why you wanted me to write out the hymn three times—I thought it was only for the sake of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.”

  To his amazement, John bowed to him. “You are most saintly, thinking only of the world of the spirit. As prior, though, I have also to reckon with this world’s concerns.”

  “You give me too much credit,” the monk protested. Under his swarthy skin he felt himself grow hot, remembering how moments ago he had been thinking, not of the world to come, but of his wife.

  “Your modesty becomes you,” was all John said to that. The prior bowed again, discomfiting the monk even more. “Now I hope you will excuse me, for I have my work to see to. Three fair copies, mind, I expect from you. In that matter I will accept no excuses.”

  The monk made one last try. “Please, reverend sir, let me labor too and write later, when our safety is assured. Surely I will earn the hatred of my brethren for being idle while they put all their strength into readying us to go.”

  “You are not idle,” John said sternly. “You are in the service of the Lord, as are they. You are acting under my orders, as are they. Only vicious fools could resent that, and vicious fools will have to deal with me.” The prior set his jaw.

  “They will do as you say, reverend sir,” the monk said—who could dare disobey John? “But they will do it from obedience alone, not from conviction, if you take my meaning.”

  “I know what you mean,” the prior said, chuckling. “How could I be who I am and not know it? Here, though, you are wrong. Not a man who was in the refectory and heard your hymn will bear you any but the kindest of wills. All will be as eager as I am to have it preserved.”

  “I hope you are right,” the monk said.

  John laughed again. “How could I be wrong? After all, I am the prior.” He thumped the monk on the back. “Now go on, and prove it for yourself.”

  With more than a little trepidation, the monk did as he had been ordered. He was surprised to find John right. Though he sat alone in the writing chamber, from time to time monks bustling past paused a moment to lean their burdens against the wall, st
ick their heads in the doorway, and encourage him to get his song down on papyrus.

  The words flowed effortlessly from his pen—as he’d told the prior, they truly were inscribed upon his heart. He took that to be another sign of God’s speaking directly through him with this hymn. He sometimes found writing a barrier; the words that sang in his mind seemed much less fine when written out. And other times his pen could not find the right words at all, and what came from it was not the fine thing he had conceived, but only a clumsy makeshift.

  Not today. When he finished the first copy, the crucial one, he compared it to what he had sung. It was as if he had seen the words of the hymn before him as he wrote. Here they were again, as pure and perfect as when the Lord had given them to him. He bent his head in thanksgiving.

  He took more papyrus and began the second and third copies. Usually when he was copying, his eyes went back to the original every few words. Now he hardly glanced at it. He had no need, not today.

  He was no fine calligrapher, but his hand was clear enough. After so long at Ir-Ruhaiyeh, writing from left to right had even begun to seem natural to him.

  The bell rang for evening prayer. The monk noticed, startled, that the light streaming in through the window was ruddy with sunset. Had his task taken any longer, he would have had to light a lamp to finish it. He rubbed his eyes, felt for the first time how tired they were. Maybe he should have lit a lamp. He did not worry about it. Even if the light of the world was failing, the light of the Holy Spirit had sustained him while he wrote.

  He took the three copies of the hymn with him as he headed for the chapel. John, he knew, would be pleased that he had finished writing in a single afternoon. So much still remained to be done before the monks left lr-Ruhaiyeh.

  Donkeys brayed. Horses snorted. Camels groaned, as if in torment. Isaac knew they would have done the same had their loads been a single straw rather than the bails and panniers lashed to their backs. The abbot stood outside the monastery gates, watching monks and beasts of burden file past.

  The leavetaking made him feel the full weight of his years. He rarely did, but Ir-Ruhaiyeh had been his home all his adult life. One does not abandon half a century and more of roots without second thoughts.

  Isaac turned to John, who stood, as he so often did, at the abbot’s right hand. “May it come to pass one day,” Isaac said, “that the Persians be driven back to their homeland so our brethren may return here in peace.”

  “And may you lead that return, father abbot, singing songs of rejoicing in the Lord,” John said. The prior’s eyes never wandered from the gateway. As each animal and man came by, he made another check mark on the long roll of papyrus he held.

  Isaac shook his head. “I am too old a tree to transplant. All other soil will seem alien to me; I shall not flourish elsewhere.”

  “Foolishness,” John said. For all his effort, though, his voice lacked conviction. Not only was he uneasy about reproving the abbot in any way; he also feared Isaac knew whereof he spoke. He prayed both he and his superior were wrong.

  “As you will.” The abbot sounded reassuring—deliberately so, John thought. Isaac knew John had enough to worry about right now.

  The procession continued. At last it came to an end: almost three hundred monks, trudging west in hope and fear. “Is everyone safely gone?” Isaac asked.

  John consulted his list, now black with checks. He frowned. “Have I missed someone?” He shouted to the nearest monk in the column. The monk shook his head. The question ran quickly up the line, and was met everywhere with the same negative response.

  John glowered down at the unchecked name, muttered under his breath. “He’s off somewhere devising another hymn,” the prior growled to Isaac. “Well and good—on any day but this. By your leave—” He started back into the now abandoned (or rather, all but abandoned) monastery.

  “Yes, go fetch him,” Isaac said. “Be kind, John. When the divine gift takes him, he forgets all else.”

  “I’ve seen.” John nodded. “But even for that we have no time today, not if we hope to stay in this world so God may visit us with His gifts.”

  Entering Ir-Ruhaiyeh after the monks had gone out of it was like seeing the corpse of a friend—no, John thought, like the corpse of his mother, for the monastery had nurtured and sheltered him as much as his fleshly parents. Hearing only the wind whistle through the courtyard, seeing doors flung carelessly open and left so forever, made John want to weep.

  His head came up. The wind was not quite all he heard. Somewhere among the deserted buildings, a monk was singing quietly to himself, as if trying the flavor of words on his tongue.

  John found him just outside the empty stables. His back was turned, so even as the prior drew near he caught only snatches of the new hymn. He was not sure he was sorry. This song seemed to be the complement of the one the monk had created in the refectory; instead of praise for the Lord, it told of the pangs of hell in terms so graphic that ice walked John’s back.

  “For the unbelievers, for the misbelievers, the scourge. Their hearts shall leap up and choke them. Demons shall seize them by feet and forelocks. Seething water shall be theirs to drink, and—” The monk broke off abruptly, jumping in surprise as John’s hand fell on his shoulder.

  “Come, Mouamet,” the prior said gently. “Not even for your songs will the Persians delay. Everyone else has gone now; we wait only on you.”

  For a moment, he did not think the monk saw him. Something that was almost fear prickled in him. Could the church itself handle a man with a gift the size of Mouamet’s, especially if he came to its heart at Constantinople? Then, slowly, John’s worry eased. The church was six centuries old, and bigger even than the Empire. No one man could twist it out of shape. Had the monk stayed among his wild cousins in Arabia, now, with no weighty tradition to restrain him…

  At last Mouamet’s face cleared. “Thank you, reverend sir,” he said. “With the Lord giving me this hymn, I’d forgotten the hour.” The abstracted expression that raised awe in John briefly returned. “I think I shall be able to recover the thread.”

  “Good,” the prior said, and meant it. “But now—”

  “—I’ll come with you,” Mouamet finished for him. Sandals scuffing in the dust, they walked together out of the monastery and set out on the long road to Constantinople.

  INSTABILITY

  Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo

  Jack and Neal, loose and blasted, sitting on the steps of the ramshackle porch of Bill Burroughs’s Texas shack. Burroughs is out in the yard, catatonic in his orgone box, a copy of the Mayan codices in his lap. He’s already fixed M twice today. Neal is cleaning the seeds out of a shoebox full of Mary Jane. Time is thick and slow as honey. In the distance the rendering company’s noon whistle blows long, shrill and insistent. The rendering company is a factory where they cut up the cows that’re too diseased to ship to Chicago. Shoot and cut and cook to tallow and canned cancer consommé.

  Burroughs rises to his feet like a figure in a well-greased Swiss clock. “There is scrabbling,” goes Bill. “There is scrabbling behind the dimensions. Bastards made a hole somewhere. You ever read Lovecraft’s ‘Colour Out of Space,’ Jack?”

  “I read it in jail,” says Neal, secretly proud. “Dig, Bill, your mention of that document ties in so exactly with my most recent thought mode that old Jung would hop a hard-on.”

  “Mhwee-heee-heee,” says Jack. “The Shadow knows.”

  “I’m talking about this bomb foolishness,” harrumphs Burroughs, stalking stiff-legged over to stand on the steps. “The paper on the floor in the roadhouse john last night said there’s a giant atom-bomb test taking place tomorrow at White Sands. They’re testing out the fucking ‘trigger bomb’ to use on that god-awful new hydrogen bomb Edward Teller wants against the Rooshians. Pandora’s box, boys, and we’re not talking cooze. That bomb’s going off in New Mexico tomorrow, and right here and now the shithead meat-flayers’ noon whistle is getting us all ready for W
orld War Three, and if we’re all ready for that, then we’re by Gawd ready to be a great civilian army, yes, soldiers for Joe McCarthy and Harry J. Anslinger, poised to stomp out the Reds ‘n’ queers ‘n’ dope fiends. Science brings us this. I wipe my queer junkie ass with science, boys. The Mayans had it aaall figured out a loooong time ago. Now take this von Neumann fella…”

  “You mean Django Reinhardt?” goes Jack, stoned and rude. “Man, this is your life, their life, my life, a dog’s life, God’s life, the life of Riley. The army’s genius von Neumann of the desert, Bill, it was in the Sunday paper Neal and I were rolling sticks on in Tuscaloosa, I just got an eidetic memory flash of it, you gone wigged cat, it was right before Neal nailed that cute Dairy Queen waitress with the Joan Crawford nose.”

  Neal goes: “Joan Crawford, Joan Crawfish, Joan Fishhook, Joan Rawshanks in the fog. McVoutie!” He’s toking a hydrant roach, and his jay-wrapping fingers are laying rapid cable. Half the damn box is already twisted up.

  Jack warps a brutal moodswing. There’s no wine. Ti Jack could use a widdly sup pour bon peek, like please, you ill cats, get me off this Earth…. Is he saying this aloud, in front of Neal and Burroughs?

  “And fuck the chicken giblets,” chortles Neal obscurely, joyously, in there, and then suggests, by actions as much as by words, Is he really talking, Jack? “That we get back to what’s really important, such as rolling up this here, ahem, urn, urp, Mexican see-gar, yes!”

  Jack crab-cakes slideways on fingertips and heels to Neal’s elbow, and they begin to lovingly craft and fashion and croon upon—and even it would not be too much to say give birth to—a beautiful McDeVoutieful hair-seeded twat of a reefer, the roach of which will be larger than any two normal sticks.