by Simon Hawke
"Don't worry about it," I said. "I'm something of an expert in curiosity, myself."
She smiled, then sighed. "Hell of a day, isn't it?"
"Yeah," I said, "and it's early yet."
Karen looked out the window. It was about noon. "The media's out in force," she said. "A murder right outside the police commissioner's building. They're going to have themselves a real field day with this." She glanced at me. "How's Princess?"
"Asleep."
She nodded. "Delayed shock reaction," she said. "Are you and Princess very close?"
"Well, no, I wouldn't say that," I replied. "We only met for the first time this morning. The building manager introduced us. He's apparently big on this ERA thing, too."
"And they wanted to get you involved?"
"I suppose," I said. "But it struck me as a fruitcake idea."
"Really? Why's that? You don't think animals having equal rights would be in your best interest?"
"Frankly, no. I think it would open up a very smelly kettle of fish. It would raise all sorts of awkward legal and ethical and moral questions, the sort of questions that don't have any easy answers. The sort of questions that would upset a lot of people."
"Apparently; it already has," said Karen grimly.
"Maybe," I said. "We don't really know that Susan Jacobs's murder had anything to do with ERA."
"What about those threats?" Karen asked.
"A threat is not the same thing as an act," I replied. "People get mad at each other all the time and say things like, ‘I’ll kill you,' but most of the time, they don't really mean it."
"True," said Karen, "but when you have a series of threats, followed by an -act that makes good on them, it begins to look a little more convincing."
"Like I said, maybe. Personally, I'm hoping that isn't the case."
"Why?"
"Because up to now, this ERA thing seems to have been little more than a curiosity, the kind of story the media would give some coverage because it's got an off-the-wall human-interest angle. But things are going to be different now. Susan Jacobs's murder makes it a big story. Like you said, they're going to have a field day with it. And things are liable to get ugly."
"I'm not sure I follow," Karen said, frowning slightly.
"Think about it," I said. "You've got a small group of activists going around saying animals deserve equal rights with humans. One of them's a media type and gets the group some coverage. No big deal. A few radio spots, a short feature here and there, nothing that would really make much of an impression, probably. Only now you've got a murder. The murder of a media personality, complete with taped death threats. Now it's a big, sensational story. Now ERA has a martyr to the cause. Now it'll make a big impression. Now people are going to start coming out of the woodwork and getting on the bandwagon. You're going to have organized protests at thaumagene shops. People are going to start writing letters to the newspapers and to their legislators. A lot of thaumagenes are going to start rethinking their position in life and deciding maybe they should do something about it. And a lot of people who don't agree with the idea are going to start resenting it. Things are liable to start getting pretty tense unless it turns out that Susan Jacobs was killed for something that had nothing to do with ERA."
"I see what you mean," said Karen. "But do you really think it's going to go that far?"
"I think the media will make sure it does," I told her. "You watch. It's got too many angles. They won't be able to resist it. They're going to pick up the ball and run with it."
The door opened and Solo came in, looking grim. There was another man with him, a balding, beefy-looking guy in a plain gray suit, his tunic open at the neck, his waistline bulging and his shoes looking very worn and comfortable. No fashion statements here, this guy was all business.
"Hello, Chief," Karen said. "Commissioner."
The chief glanced at her and frowned faintly.
"Officer Sharp, sir," she said.
He nodded and grunted softly.
"Where's Princess?" Solo asked.
"Asleep," I said. "She was looking kind of wobbly, so I thought I'd put her on the couch in the guest room."
Solo nodded. "Oh, Chief, this is Catseye Gomez. He's visiting from Santa Fe. Gomez, this is Chief Moran."
"Hello, Chief," I said.
Moran looked down at me and scowled. A real animal lover. I could tell.
Solo plopped down on the couch and sighed heavily. Moran simply stood there, looking like a tank.
"You shouldn't have spoken to the press, Commissioner," he said. "You should've let me handle it."
"Hell, I had to tell them something, John," said Solo wearily. "One of my neighbors gets blown up right outside my front door, I can't very well say 'No comment,' you know what I mean?"
Moran grunted again. "Yeah, but the way they grilled you makes the department look bad. You shoulda held off and then issued a statement later, after we had something to go on."
"Do we have something to go on?" Solo asked.
"Well, so far we know that whoever wired the victim's car knew what they were doing," Moran said. "The device wasn't connected to the battery switch, otherwise it would've gone up the moment she started the car outside the radio station. So that means it was either a timed device or else a remote detonator. We should know in a couple of hours. Probably whoever did it installed the device while she was on the air this morning. Pretty cool customer, to do it right out on the street, in broad daylight. And then we've got those death threats, which I'd better take with me and get to the lab."
"I want to hear them first," said Solo.
He got up and went over to the answering machine on his desk. He took the three tiny cassettes out of his pocket and popped the top one into the machine, after first taking out the tape already in it. He clicked it on.
Beep. "Susan, this is Dana. Great show this morning. We still on for Mudd's tonight? Christy called and said she can't make it. Got a hot date. Call me."
Beep. "Susan? Christy. Look, I'm sorry, but I'm gonna have to cancel out tonight. Got a date for dinner with this very sexy man I just met. God, he's so gorgeous! Could be a late night, I hope, I hope. Tell you all about it tomorrow. Wish me luck. Love ya."
Beep. "Man was put on this earth to have dominion over animals, not be equal with them. Animals are inferior creatures, and thaumagenes are an abomination in the face of God. ERA is blasphemy. You have incurred the wrath of God and you shall be struck down."
Moran snorted. "Terrific. That's just what we need. A fucking religious freak."
Solo reached out and stopped the tape, rewound it, and listened again. He sat there and listened through all the tapes, noting down the names of all the callers. There were five more threatening calls, much like the first one. The same muffled male voice, same kind of nutso messages. The caller sounded like a die-hard Christian Fundamentalist.
There were still a few of them around, and they didn't seem like very happy people. At one time, in the days prior to the Collapse, the Christian Fundamentalist movement had been going very strong. As the world grew more and more complex, more and more people found themselves with a need for simple answers, and Christianity, especially Fundamentalist Christianity, provided them. The lure was simplicity itself. Believe in the Lord. Turn your life over to Christ. Jesus came to Earth to bear the burden of responsibility for the sins of humankind, for which selfless act they crucified him, and so he became a martyr to the cause of Truth. Place your faith in Jesus and be "born again." In return, the slate's wiped clean. You get one great, big "Do Over.'' You can be cleansed and start anew, living in a state of grace, and if life starts posing those nasty, complicated questions, all you have to do is pray and read the Bible. Gather together in His name, in a place where His messenger, the preacher, will explain the finer points to you and tell you what He wants you to do. Just remember to drop something in the collection plate, whatever you can afford, and if money is a little tight this month, don't worry, just ca
ll the 800 number, toll free, He takes credit cards.
It got to be a pretty big thing there for a while. They had their own radio and TV networks, their own publications, their cathedrals and their Bible colleges, their universities, and even their amusement parks, complete with time-share condominiums. Every now and then, one of the preachers would be nailed for fraud or tax evasion or some other scandal, but all they had to do was cry on television and repent. After all, the Lord was nailed, too, and they were only human. They "stumbled," succumbed to the temptations of the flesh, and then prostrated themselves with grief and touching sincerity in public, rededicating themselves to their faith with renewed vigor. The faithful flocked to them in ever greater numbers to be fleeced. Maybe that's why they called the Lord their shepherd.
During the Collapse, Fundamentalism reached a fever pitch. Everything was falling apart, and the preachers were announcing the arrival of the Apocalypse. In many ways, those were, indeed, Apocalyptic times, only the world survived, the Second Coming never came, and the souls of the faithful did not rise up to Heaven. At least, not spontaneously. There were some far-out, Fundamentalist cult groups that tried to hasten the process along by indulging in mass ritual suicide, despite the fact that traditional Christian belief held suicide to be a sin, but if their god was truly a forgiving one, then perhaps their souls gained admittance to the paradise they sought. But all those who waited more passively, if no less eagerly, to be lifted up, were doomed to disappointment. The world survived. In fact, it not only survived, it flowered, thanks to the return of magic. And for many of them, that proved to be a problem.
Magic was not really accepted in the Christian faith. One could indeed argue, as Merlin had, that the Christian Church had been built upon many pagan traditions, or at the very least had borrowed from them. Belief in the death and resurrection of the Christ paralleled pagan beliefs in the death and resurrection of the God and Goddess, to mark the seasons. The Christian ritual of transubstantiation, Merlin pointed out, was really no different from many pagan rituals of magic. But that only infuriated the Christian opposition.
Some argued that it wasn't magic, but merely a symbolic act, a ritual of reaffirmation of the faith. But nevertheless a ritual, Merlin had replied, just as many pagan rituals were meant to reaffirm a connection with the natural, primal forces of the universe. Others argued that it wasn't magic, but a miracle, performed by God Himself, and while the Host was not actually transformed into a bloody piece of flesh torn from Christ's body, it nevertheless became imbued with all the qualities that body and spirit had possessed. To which Merlin had replied that pagan rituals could also be looked upon as miracles, brought about by a connection between those who were performing them and the natural forces inherent in the world.
Merlin had not attacked the Christian Church, nor any other faith. He taught that anything that brought about attunement with the creative forces of the universe was good, and he maintained that there was no one path to the Truth. Yet that was precisely where he ran up against the strongest opposition.
Merlin Ambrosius had been denounced from every pulpit as a fraud, a sinner, and a necromancer in league with the Devil. In vain, Merlin had protested that the Devil was a purely Christian invention. He was not a Christian, therefore he did not believe in the existence of the Devil. His faith predated Christianity, and his pagan beliefs were based upon a veneration of natural creative forces, seen in the masculine and feminine dualities occurring throughout Nature and personified as the God and Goddess, or the Lord and Lady, or Diana and Apollo, or any of a score of different names. What you called them did not matter, Merlin had insisted. Personification of the gods was merely a matter of convenience, a frame of reference. So, for that matter, were the gods themselves.
Go out at night and look up at the moon, he'd said. Revel in the beauty of the stars and feel the cool night breezes on your skin. Or go out and climb a mountain on a sunny day, and gaze up at the sky. Look out at the panorama spread before you, the trees, the meadows, the grasses and the flowers, the entire panoply of natural creation stretching out in all directions. What difference did it make, he'd asked, if you called it God, or if you personified the creative forces of the universe in the ancient masculine and feminine duality of witchcraft, or the multiple personas of the Norse gods, or the gods of Greece and Rome, or if you called it Buddha, or Allah, or Wakan Tonka. It was all the same.
They tried to kill him, anyway. All in the name of God, of course. However, Merlin had expected that and he'd prepared for it. Modern weapons were certainly superior to those used in King Arthur's day, but they were nevertheless weapons created through the means of science, while the forces Merlin was in tune with, and could call upon, were of an entirely different nature. Older and more powerful. What was a mere gun compared to the elemental forces of creation? They had tried to stop him, but they had succeeded only in proving his point. Magic worked.
Had he chosen to, Merlin could probably have set himself up as a messiah and brought down the Christian Church, but such was never his intention. He was not out to bring about a religious revolution, but a revolution in the way people perceived themselves, especially in relation to the world in which they lived. I guess he figured that whatever faith you chose to follow, if it helped you make it through the cold, dark night, then it was a good thing. So long as it harmed nobody else. In that respect, he was inflexible. To the extent that any religion proclaimed itself to be the One True Faith, he fought it, not to destroy it, but to get it to loosen up and be more tolerant of other systems of belief.
It was not an easy task, but then, Merlin was no ordinary man. And he had something that the blighted world desperately needed. Knowledge. Knowledge of an old, forgotten path from which humanity had strayed. They had known it once, in their most primitive days of evolution, when they had been under the dominion of the Old Ones, and they had learned to walk it for themselves after the Old Ones fell from power, but they had strayed from it when they began to live in cities and to think of Nature as something apart from themselves, something not to be in tune with, but something to be tamed and dominated.
In time, as magic spread throughout the world through Merlin and his disciples, the Christian Church was forced to make some changes, as were other major faiths such as Judaism and Islam. For some, such as the Zen Buddhists, the coming of the Second Thaumaturgic Age did not require radical changes in their systems of belief. But for others, it meant change in the form of new interpretations.
The word "infidel" was stricken from the tenets of the Islamic faith. There were no longer any infidels, because everybody worshipped Allah, even if they called Him by a different name or followed Him in different ways. Jews and Christians ceased to debate the issue of whether or not Jesus Christ was the Messiah, because the question ceased to have any relevance. Everyone had the capacity to be a savior, to accept the burden of responsibility for their fellow human beings and their planet, so long as they could accept responsibility for their own actions. Every man became the Son of God, and every woman became the Daughter of the Goddess. The Trinity became the Father, the Mother, and the Holy Spirit, which had entered Christ, and Moses, and Buddha, and Bodhidharma, and Muhammad, and anyone, in fact, who chose to open up their soul and receive it.
Nowadays, most people still considered themselves Christians or Jews or Muslims or Buddhists or whatever, but there were also many people who considered themselves Neo-Pagans, which meant simply that they could enter any church or shrine or temple and take part in the services, donning yarmulkes or removing their shoes, prostrating themselves toward Mecca or taking Communion, respecting the traditions of the services being conducted, because it was all regarded as the same. It was an honoring of and an atunement with the creative forces of the universe, and it gave them strength and peace. For that matter, they could just as easily commune with Nature on a mountaintop, or in a park or meadow, or go out on a balcony or the roof of a tall building and gaze at the moon and stars. There was no
One True Path, because all paths leading in a spiritual direction were the same. Magic touched them all.
Unfortunately, there have always been those whose hearts and minds were closed, and these people made up the Fundamentalist sects of the world's faiths. Often, these were people whose souls were small and shriveled things, who found meaning not in celebration of the world around them, but who sought significance in demeaning all those who did not see things their way. Their numbers had grown smaller over the years, their hearts had grown colder, and their tolerance had shrunk almost to nonexistence. Inasmuch as they needed to live with their fellow creatures in their day-to-day existence, they put up with them and often kept their own council. But when they gathered together with those who shared their narrow-minded beliefs, it was to sing the praises of their own superiority and state of grace in a world that had gone all wrong and decadent around them. They had that right. But they had no right to interfere with the rights of others. They had no right to force their own beliefs on anybody else.
I had learned about human religious beliefs because of my own relentless curiosity. I had none myself. At least, not in the formal sense. Humans were the only creatures on this Earth who had religion. Animals had no need of such formalized beliefs. We knew we were a part of Nature, and we felt its forces in and around us all the time. We didn't choose to give it names, or represent it in some god or prophet that we could relate to. We merely accepted it and were a part of it. That didn't make us any better or any worse, I guess, it simply made us what we were. But no animal had ever killed another because that animal had disagreed with its system of belief.
Solo took the last little cassette out of the machine and stared at it for a moment, the expression on his face unreadable. However, I could guess what he was thinking. He put the three of them together, slipped the rubber band around them, and handed them to Chief Moran.
