But hopelessness clouds their mercy. They fear that there is no saving these corrupted creatures who were born out of selfishness, forged from the basest of appetites, their consciousness brought forth in pain. The madness that is eating away at their own morality may one day consume their progeny.
Moreover, the universe is not as big as it once was, and time is relative. Parent and child may very well meet again, unaware of their connection except for a vague, genetic familiarity. In some distant future, will the created meet creators who have completely succumbed to rage, lust and hunger? On that day, will the work of the council be fulfilled, the creations slaughtered in service to their creators? Yahweh and Shaitan do not know. They can only hope that if that day does arrive, their children will be strong enough to withstand.
Wendi Dunlap has been writing speculative fiction since she was seven-years-old. Drawn to the genre by the Arthurian legends and the epic traditions of Europe, she has found a way to combine African mythology, history, culture, and sociopolitical critique into the fantastic sagas she enjoyed as a child.
Her writing career has spanned across film, journalism, poetry, and cultural critique. She holds a BA in Film and Africana Studies from Cornell University. By day, she works in Digital Advertising. In the evenings, she is completing her first full-length novel, a macabre horror epic.
The Temptation of St. Ivo
Cody Goodfellow
Illustrated by Dave Felton
Strange quicksilver rain fell from high above the clouds upon the face of the sulfurous mudflats and glaciers of frozen ammonia on the morning of the first day. From the deceleration corona of For His Own Glory, a briefcase-sized nanoprocessor ship circling the unsurveyed world in its abusive binary orbit around a bloated, moribund red giant and a blue daystar in an Oswalt density near the center of the Milky Way. The microscopic compiler-impregnated rain immediately began to order and accrete native molecules, but they sprang to life and industry only when the narrow strictures of biology and polity had been satisfied, only when the presence of primitive yet promising lifeforms were examined and their genotypes and vestigial souls holographically vivisected for signs of readiness to receive the word of the Evolved Christ.
Out of the mud rose a bowed spine and spoke-like spires of new-minted marble and windows of brilliantly hued stained glass, a humble tabernacle with the general outline of a chambered nautilus, and out from its yawning doors was disgorged the steam-wreathed likeness of a man.
Father Ivo Tsieh-Mondragon of the Mendelian Brotherhood knelt upon the trackless mud and suffered the primary lifeforms to come unto him. He took in his silicon gauntlets a Bible, opened its cover of ivory and horn, and began to read holistic code from the Amended Genesis, the Lamarckian Psalms, and the Song of Selection with such elevated passion that three of his teeth cracked, owing to a shortage of hydroxyapatite in local soils. Drawn into its coruscating radiant light, squirming meta-amoebas like beached jellyfish arched and contorted their opalescent membranes in an ecstasy of mindless enlightenment, vestigial organelles pulsating with electrochemical sparks of quantum uplift, the deathless words inscribed in letters of holographic fire in the dead-end helices of genetic script.
And as the sun set upon the First Day, Father Ivo looked up from the Bible and said, “Amen,” and he saw that many among the numberless swarm of amoeboid pagan babies regarded him with crude free-floating eyespots with the same irises of cold cornflower as his own eyes, and he saw that it was good.
* * *
Even when the prophets of the empirical method and the scholars of the mystical finally united and linked arms to discover and celebrate the Grand Design as humanity’s highest purpose, the path of the Church of the Evolved Christ was ever beset by thorns.
As humanity faced the wreck of its only begotten homeworld and stagnation and speciation in scattered solar system niches, the Mother Church’s last flagellants accepted the age of the universe and the intelligent design of all life as His greatest miracle. Science cracked the method, or at least a method, by which the Creator enacted His work in the encoding of anti-entropic light. First a tool for education and indoctrination for its encoding of any amount of information into full-spectrum visible radiation, it soon proved useful for quantum gene therapy. Such combination accelerated the diaspora of genotypes until organisms couldn’t exchange bacteria, let alone procreate, but it also allowed the syncretic church’s early inquisitors to spread the human “meme” far beyond humanity’s reach.
The first interstellar seedships to leave the Black Eye of Pluto and successfully make landfall on inhabited worlds found not only the seeming universality of the double helix and the humanoid form but also strange artifacts of psychobiological corruption even among aliens with no morphological kinship to humanity—gangster planets, gladiator planets, brachiating octopi Nazi Stormtroopers, and ambulatory fungi flower children with ancient hippie folksongs in their mangled DNA.
The galaxy’s reprisals for these early errors of cosmic cupidity were swift and horrendous in their world-burning fury. Humanity was hunted and wiped out in hundreds of systems, forced to reinvent itself as the Word that lived in the Light and became flesh only at the will of spontaneously authored nanocompilers. Suffered only to minister to the lowest lifeforms on uncolonized worlds with dying primaries in the margins of the Milky Way, the church’s ministers yet had spread the Word to tens of thousands of worlds in the first eleven millennia of their mission, and everywhere, they found fertile soil for their message of uplift, of the kinship of all lifeforms in their shaping by the Hand of the Almighty, and of the grace awaiting them when their forms reflected His divine face.
* * *
On the morning of the Second Day, Father Ivo was taken aback to find his charges engulfed in a schism.
After a gruesome but swift and wholly necessary purging of the unmutated, the surviving membranous sacs, inspired to develop eyes and ears, had been set upon by a faction that had shrewdly turned vacuole orifices into jawless mouths lined with silica teeth. Formerly content with ingesting plankton analogues and eubacteria colonies to supplement chemosynthesis of their mineral-rich habitat, the uplifted blobs now thrived upon cannibalism, further complicated by the move from mitotic reproduction to sexual conjugation of offspring. The females quickly became much larger and far more rapacious than their unlucky mates.
Clearly, the victors in the internecine warfare at his feet would be those favored few with both adaptations as well as the first outgrowths of teeth and rude skeletal features, but the resulting bottleneck would leave a depleted population, slower to respond to the chatoyant Light of his evangelization. The Bible must have sensed his nagging guilt over this, for it refused to heal his broken teeth and subjected him to a rigorous catechism.
In his unnumbered incarnations over ten thousand years of ministry, Father Ivo Tsieh-Mondragon had converted 793 species to accept the spirit and image of the Evolved Christ and had been martyred 3,889 times. But it was a function of his undying faith, as well as his hastily compiled bodies, that he was more agonized by the scrutiny of the only book he had ever read with every examination.
“Why, O my son,” spoke the thunderous voice of the Lord, “did I create all that lives?”
“To revel in the glory of creation and its creator.”
“And why did I make all that lives in such a multiplicity of forms?”
“Each life is a note in the Grand Design, pointing to the glory of His image, which is writ in the form of mankind.”
“But why, O my son, must all that lives know pain, fear, hunger, and death?”
Ivo hesitated before answering, the biting cold strumming the exposed nerves of his broken, ill-made teeth. “The devil Entropy assails the web of Life to unmake it but, by testing it, allows the Living to come to know uplift to a higher order of complexity, allows the promise of sharing the form of the Creator and dwelling with Him forever when heat death claims the universe.”
“And what is the d
uty of those blessed few who know the shape of their Creator?”
“To witness after the model of the Evolved Christ, to demonstrate his fitness and deliver even unto the least of these the Light of His Word . . .”
Sometimes, unworthy thoughts assailed the serenity of his faith when he could afford it least. Sometimes, the only thing more absurd than traveling across the galaxy as an immortal hologram, reincarnating on every godforsaken terrestrial body out of thin air to witness the self-evident divine lineage of a Bronze Age hedge magician who performed catering miracles at weddings, was the absurdity of dying five thousand times on as many worlds to spread the gospel of a messiah who only died for one world’s sins once (and may have faked it, if some were to be believed). That and constantly having his motives attacked by a weak AI with a split personality derived from the two antithetical depictions of God in the Old and New Testaments.
* * *
On the morning of the Third Day, the snares of the devil Entropy were out for Father Ivo as he was attacked by his food supply.
Where, yesterday, the crop of native foliose lichen had presented a piebald field of chemosynthetic bladders and scabs on a substrate of spiny crystalline boulders, it now was a hydra-headed snarl of carnivorous barnacle geese with razor-beaks of black glass and gummy tendrils that salivated muriatic acid as they snapped up the stupid worms drawn wriggling into the crop with their rudimentary notocords glistering with lightning strikes of arousal.
Father Ivo nearly lost his hand along with the sleeve of his raiment when he tried to pick a sheaf of the rubbery rock-meat for his matins meal. The practical and political value of eating wherever possible of the same food as his flock was not lost on him, but even before the attack, the dismal flavor had him pining for the memory of his own recycled bodily wastes.
He did not wait for the Bible to interrogate him about how this ugly miracle had come to pass. The lichen had somehow absorbed the Light or at least had ingested the tissues in flux when it began devouring the slowest of his flock, but it hardly mattered. For all he knew, he would be raked over the coals for failing to recognize in the lichen a fitter candidate for conversion and quantum uplift.
Best not to leave the Lord any choice.
On the Bible’s narrowest dilation, Father Ivo seared the unruly lichen with the Light of Revelation until he’d razed it to its semi-ambulatory roots and fused the mud to a convex lens of steaming obsidian. Entropy is the devil, he told himself, and its snares must be spotted and slipped for His own glory. Every neck that stretches does not reach the Tree, but every stretch brings the Head closer to the Face of God.
The ground seemed to belch in approval of his words, thrusting up alarmingly until a bubble of mud twice his height flung him backward. The bubble burst, and a fountain of white fire and a pyroclastic cloud engulfed Father Ivo who, stunned with excruciating pain and swimming in molten glass, could not appreciate the Extreme Unction his Bible recited for him even as the sinkhole produced by the explosion engulfed him.
* * *
On the morning of the Fourth Day, Father Ivo Tsieh-Mondragon emerged from his tabernacle to find his flock had vanished. Still shaky from his hasty incarnation upon receipt of the death notice from his previous body’s Bible, Father Ivo was further disturbed by his first waking memory: that of an incomplete body compiling in the tabernacle’s glandular pantry. The living chapel apparently did not place much faith in his survival, for he noticed there were more resources allocated to compiling successors than into replacing the torched food supply.
Icy wind sliced through his robes but did little to quash the stench of ammonia, sulfur, and bacterial blooms. The mystery of the missing mendicants, at least, was easily solved. From the spawning bogs where they painfully ascended through half a billion years of evolution in three days, the stamps of lobe-finned migration herring-boned up the slimy slopes to the slag-capped sinkhole and pointed down a narrow lava tube of dripping crystal that Father Ivo managed to penetrate only with some difficulty and shedding of armored garments.
That their trail coincided with the location of his lost Bible was a source of both comfort and alarm. Their simple nervous systems might quiver with religious ardor for the book that lifted them out of oblivion, but they might also be attracted to its leaking quantum radiation and so grow into the shape of the Unmaker.
With all the detachment he could muster, he examined the last sensations of his old body until they were like a stranger’s personal effects. In his panic, Father Ivo had ignited a pocket of methane clathrate suspended beneath the lichen and been sucked under when the explosion had collapsed itself. He came rather unexpectedly upon the Bible, fused to the wall of the tube by a thin crust of glass, smeared with the slime of the passage of his wayward parishioners and embossed with a poignant handprint of caramelized flesh.
They had crawled over the source of their salvation in their morbid haste to reach the bottom of the tube, which terminated in the apex of a dome-shaped cavern that resisted every attempt to gauge its size with visible light and sonar. But what his light did bring into shocking relief, suspended on a rack of spear-like stalagmites of smoky crystal, was his own mortal remains.
Father Ivo had beheld his own dead form more times than he cared to count, but this tableau in particular quickened him with an almost mortal awe at the sublime beauty at the heart of his often maddening, seldom satisfying faith. Though this death had come about in no small part due to his own cupidity, this particular body almost embodied, to his new one, the ideal of Humanity.
Suspended in a supine position with limbs splayed out to demonstrate the elegance of its bilateral symmetry wedded to a linear asymmetry, of complexity yoked to the simplest possible form that could claim the stars. Digits fanned out in supplication, facial features rigid in ecstatic excruciation, transformed by the fatal breath of the divine. In death, he attained a universality, ascended to iconography. He was St. Theresa, San Sebastian, Vitruvian Man, Adam waiting to receive the spark of life from the hand of the Lord, and hanging above him, Father Ivo could not but look upon him as the Lord must have looked upon the First Man on the day that blessed mutation finally shattered the chains of Entropy, stood upright, and looked at the heavens to utter the First Word in praise of his Creator. Hundreds of species more “advanced” than humanity existed, but with few exceptions, they were decadent, detestable races declined into a twilight of over-specialization, kept alive in a selective vacuum by the toil of lesser, often humanoid, slave races.
Father Ivo found himself short of breath, eyes tearing up for want of blinking. The second skin of rippling, mottled glass like a stylized halo of holy light, the seven needles of crystal piercing his torso, only gave the tableau the brittle, unreal brilliance of the doctrinal visions drilled into his head just before he awakened, and the fact that the body was identical to his own in every way made it impossible to look away, even as he could not quite accept its reality.
The cult of saints had become thicker than a planetary census within a century of the first wave of missionaries, and the criteria for martyrdom had risen to ignore all but those who suffered true death with the failure or corruption of reincarnation from a tabernacle hatchery, yet Father Ivo was moved to record the image and request that the Bible submit his predecessor for beatification before he could move himself to deploy nanomites to decompose it.
It was perhaps a noble impulse to do justice to so total a sacrifice or perhaps a stirring of insecure conscience that led him to explore the cavern further. Father Ivo assiduously avoided examining his own motives as he extruded a braided rope of his own hair to the floor of the grotto of metamorphic lava rock encrusted with a corona of towering stalagmites radiating from a spherical feature nearly a hundred meters in diameter that yet bore the unmistakable contours of an architectural feature, rather than a topographical one. His flock was gone, and he was not inclined to lose his coming day of rest for having to start over.
The floor of the grotto was blistered w
ith moguls of tortured rock. The trail of the wandering worms was a prismatic carpet he followed to the underbelly of the sphere where an orifice of sorts admitted entrance to an interior space lit by viridian phosphorescence, once he shattered a phalanx of crystal spars. The sphere seemed to sweat the crystals with an urgency that must be reaction to his presence, for he could hear them growing like mineral lightning, throbbing with subtle stresses under the weight of his Bible’s light or under the subtler pressure of his gaze. The concave walls of the sphere were corrugated with sinuous markings he was forced to credit as deliberate. Though it bore little resemblance to any known script the Bible had ever encountered, it was yet unmistakably the result of some agency.
But even this could not hold his attention when he beheld the thing at the center of the temple.
A trembling elliptical mass, nearly touching the stalactites, floated suspended above a circular pit in the floor at the spherical chamber’s center. It would have served as a fitting idol, an eidolon of whatever was once worshiped here, were it not composed of the wriggling bodies of his missing flock.
Countless thousands of worms in a rat-king swarm, a cluster so dense it tensed and relaxed like a vast heart with the naked ardor of a spawning orgy, yet as he watched, they seemed to eat each other—no, they simply merged, one into another with a sickening fluidity, skins dissolving together and organs entwining in a perverse reversal of mitosis, engulfing each other before his eyes until only a finite number of vast blobs of glittering protoplasm swirled and strained in a shapeless form that drove Father Ivo to his knees with unbelieving awe when it finally deigned to speak to him.
Ride the Star Wind: Cthulhu, Space Opera, and the Cosmic Weird Page 44
