“The doctor in the E.R.,” Catherine corrected.
“He assured us he’d follow up, look after Marty. Besides, Marty’s regular physician might very well be a resister, too.”
“Sure,” Catherine snorted. “And when Marty’s discharged, if he’s discharged, who’ll look after him? Who’ll keep him out of rehab? Who’ll protect him on the streets if he manages to avoid rehab? You can bet it won’t be some doctor, safely ensconced in his Lafayette Square townhouse.”
She’d never before examined the multitude of paths toward one human being’s destruction, or the ineluctability of suffering along each one, or the potential for repetition of pain and loss. Breathless, she rolled the window down farther. The river smelled of oil and decay.
Theo searched her face. “It’s not just Marty, is it.”
Catherine filled her lungs with air and held it until she felt lightheaded. “No.” She looked beseechingly at Theo, unsure what it was she was asking of him. “I’m so damned sick of leaving people behind. And this time…this time somebody really needed me. I could’ve stayed in St. Louis and seen Marty every day, done whatever was in my power to help him.”
“He has friends,” Theo said. “They’re every bit as capable and caring as you. Damn it, Cat, each enclave has to look out for its own. We have business—”
“Mankind is my business!” she said stridently, quoting the forlorn ghost of Jacob Marley. Then she shook her head and gave a sour laugh. “Has it ever occurred to you, Theo, that we might be turning our backs on very real lives and deaths to pursue a phantom?”
Theo kept his eyes on hers for a moment, and Catherine discerned a dam going up behind them. It is enough, he seemed to be saying, to concern ourselves with Great Causes and Higher Purposes; please don’t expect us to champion individual welfare.
He turned his eyes to the road. “Has it ever occurred to you, Caty, that we might improve many lives and prevent many deaths by finding this ‘phantom’? Don’t you realize that ‘the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few…or the one’?”
Catherine couldn’t help but chuckle. “I weigh in with Dickens and you counter with Mr. Spock. Apparently we’re deadlocked.”
In fact, she knew they were. There was simply no arguing the point with Theo. He believed too firmly in the Summoner’s existence and impact. This was neither phantom nor furbelow, this madman. He was the supreme functionary, the insurer of impetus, the linchpin of the Juggernaut. And Theo was determined to find him.
She said to the priest, “Star Trek wisdom aside, if you really think the Summoner’s influence is so wide-ranging—”
“Incalculable,” Theo broke in. His gaze was still on the road, but more distantly so. “Religious, political, social. Even cultural.”
“That’s the extent of Paragenesis’ influence, not one man’s.”
“You are wrong!” Theo immediately looked ashamed at having raised his voice. He blinked self-consciously as he turned his eyes from Catherine. “I just read in Choice”—his fingers glided over the underground newspaper in his lap—“that hundreds of art treasures have been removed from the National Gallery. Three people were killed and seventy-eight injured protesting the atrocity. We hear or read this kind of thing every day now. Paragenesis has always been lax in its respect for the secular, always eager to overstep its constitutional bounds, but it hasn’t always been so flagrant in its scorn and outrageous in its condemnations…and so effective in transforming scorn and condemnation into accepted action. And when did the change take place, Cat?”
She shrugged. The era of persecution seemed to stretch back forever. When she looked into the past she saw only fewer layers of it, less accumulation.
“Think,” Theo prompted. “There was a turning point, and you’ll remember it if you give it some thought. How and when did this extremist faction turn the corner and become America’s Hezbollah?”
Catherine traced Paragenesis to its origins. Every step she took into the past led to another step, still further back. True, there was a time when it was merely a loose alliance of fundamentalist ministries, zealously eager to Christianize the depraved American Way of Life but largely ignored by mainstream citizens. It wasn’t, however, ignored by conservative politicians, who had always been sensitively responsive to its demands.
At first, the growth of the sleeping giant took place in small increments. Paragenesis was fed by changes in state laws, then national laws, then Supreme Court decisions, some of which had no direct connection to or historical link with the alliance but strengthened it nonetheless. Books began disappearing from schools and public libraries; stem cell research was banned; “gay rights” and “abortion rights” became oxymorons; the high court supported the integration of church and state through a series of seemingly innocuous decisions favoring religion. Ironically, Islamic fundamentalists proved the greatest allies of their Christian counterparts by prompting the passage of “anti-terrorism” laws that increasingly eroded civil liberties in the United States. Radical Islam also provided a model for organized repression under theocratic rule.
Paragenesis’ greatest achievement was getting one of their own nominated for the vice presidency on what turned out to be a winning Republican ticket. More political victories, mostly state and local, followed, but soon Paragenesis was suffering from a canker of infighting: evangelicals versus reconstructionists, charismatics versus Calvinists, Baptists versus other Baptists. Each ministry so cherished its own “inerrant” interpretation of Scripture that it was loath to compromise on application, no matter how small the nit of disagreement. It wasn’t until…
“The March,” Catherine said. “I guess the March really got the ball rolling.”
Theo brightened and pointed a finger at her. “Right! ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’, that nationwide extravaganza that had every pol waving his baptismal certificate. And how do you suppose Paragenesis, splintered as it was, managed to become unified enough to pull off such an incredibly well organized and visible show of solidarity? Because it had an orchestrator, Cat. Because for months in advance some brilliant, monomaniacal tactician was pulling all the factions together and schooling those purblind Pharisees on how to bring Moral America’s simmering indignation to a uniform rolling boil.”
“And it was right after that,” Catherine said, still piecing together the memories, “that we started hearing about the Summoner. But the secular media only mentioned him on rare occasions, in passing. They seemed bemused by the term. And I just assumed it was a euphemism for Christ or the Holy Spirit.”
“As I did,” Theo confessed. “As probably all of the ‘Unsaved’ did, if they bothered to think about it at all. And then we quite easily and stupidly forgot about the March and the subsequent Message to Washington campaign. And we forgot about whatever voice had ‘summoned’ millions of fearful, frustrated, furious people to rally around Goodness. But elected officials didn’t forget. And those millions of marchers and callers and letter-writers certainly didn’t. Only we complacent non-followers”—Theo patted his chest—“were foolish enough to put that blast of fervor out of our minds.”
“Until the shit hit the fan,” Catherine said.
Theo laughed. “Until then. And while we were ducking and looking for cover and wondering how the hell it could’ve happened—the constitutional amendments, the institutionalized conformity, the camps and codes and new curricula—that name began surfacing again, on wondering whispers: the Summoner.”
In space, no one can hear you scream…but don’t let that stop you.
Tethers
© 2006 Sara Reinke
Available in ebook and paperback from Samhain Publishing
Survivor Kathryn Emmente must decide who is friend and who is foe when her cargo vessel, the Daedalus, explodes under mysterious circumstances. Many among her crew are killed and the rest are left helpless and stranded on a terra-farming colony moon of Jupiter called X-1226. They have no means of communicating with Earth or even the near
est stellar platform for aid.
Kat soon learns that the detonations aboard the Daedalus and the deaths of her fellow crewmates may not have been as accidental or incidental as they first appeared. She begins to suspect that one among the survivors may be operating on a hidden, sinister agenda—and that she and her young daughter, Jerica, could be the next victims.
Enjoy the following excerpt for Tethers:
“Do you think this place will ever be like Earth?” Jerica asked as they bounced along in the HUM-V. “Full of people and cities and stuff?”
“Eventually,” Eric said. “You’ll probably be around to see it.”
As a future terra-farming colony, X-1226 had an artificial atmosphere designed to make its surface optimal for harboring life. The little moon, once a desolate chunk of rock hovering between the outermost edge of an asteroid belt in Jupiter’s massive gravitational field, was now a sub-tropical paradise, replete with weather patterns, precipitation and lush, dense vegetation. This was the result of more than ten years of deliberate, concentrated cultivation. Like a cake baking in a temperamental oven, X-1226 had been monitored day in and day out, by numerous computers both at the nearby stellar platform and on earth, and scientists had insured that the right amount of elements and gases were maintained. There was more science to it than Kat had ever understood. Playing God is what Alex had always called it.
The HUM-V grazed a tree and jostled over a fallen log. The equipment in the back hatch slid precariously.
“What have you got up on screen, Jerica?” Kat asked.
“We’ve come a little more than ten miles,” Jerica said. “We won’t be able to keep going much further. It gets really rough up ahead.”
Eric shifted the HUM-V into a lower gear, and it growled as it clambered over more fallen trees and large, rocky knolls.
“The box should be just up ahead.” Jerica frowned. “There’s something there. Something big, but not part of the terrain.”
“It’s got to be part of the ship,” Kat said. “Something that didn’t burn in the atmosphere.”
“Stop, Eric!” Jerica leaned forward excitedly. “Stop here.”
The little HUM-V rumbled to a halt. Kat swung her door open and hopped out. The grass was tall, almost to her knees. She could hear insects buzzing and chirping, transplanted from Earth. “Where, Jerica?”
“Over there, past the trees.”
Eric and Frank climbed out of the vehicle, too.
“Wait for me!” Jerica opened her door and swung her legs around.
“No, pup, you stay there.” Kat looked back at her daughter.
“But, Mommy—”
“Jerica, I said stay in the HUM-V.”
Jerica huffed and puffed, but stayed put.
Kat, Eric and Frank made their way through the grass. It whispered against their pant legs and folded under their boots. They carefully worked through the trees and thick foliage until they reached a spot that had been gouged through the woods.
The trees lay knocked aside, snapped in two like toothpicks. Some had been burned. The earth was churned up as if cleaved by an enormous plow. There was a pungent, scorched stink in the air.
A towering metal cone laying on its side in the trench. It had been seared black. It was as wide as at least four HUM-Vs and nearly as tall as the outer wall of the colony compound.
A cable sprouted from the top. It draped across the ground before coming to a burned stump a few feet away from them.
“What is it, Mom?” Jerica whispered in Kat’s headset.
“It’s part of the tether,” Kat replied quietly. “The gravitational tether.”
“The black box is inside it,” Eric said. “We’ll need the equipment out of the truck to get to it.”
Kat walked toward the cone. She stared at it, transfixed.
How many times did I see this swing slowly past the window in my quarters? Watching it after Alex and I made love…we always just took it for granted…
She remembered her first space mission. Nothing had prepared her for the strange, alien gravity of the oscillating tether. She had been sick from the moment she’d come out of cryostasis. She had eventually gotten used to it, and anymore, Kat would find herself feeling nauseous on Earth, where the gravitational pull was stronger, more insistent.
“You okay, Kat?” Eric’s voice, low and kind in her earphone.
“Yeah, I’m fine. I was just thinking…”
“Well, you know better than that,” he told her, and she laughed.
“Just hurry up and get the equipment we need,” she said. “I want to get this over with. The sooner the better.”
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Sweet Moon Dreams Page 25
