The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year: Volume Eight

by Jonathan Strahan

  "Vicarious absolution." Teuta steepled his fingers. "My idea. In exchange for a substantial offering, you can ensure the salvation of someone else's soul, even if he's not actually a believer himself. He doesn't have to know about it, if that's what you want. For double the money, you can even save someone's soul against his will. We think it'll be very popular."

  I tried. I went to the magistrates and swore a complaint, but the chief justice was a believer and threw the case out for lack of evidence. I went to the chief archimandrite of the Fire Temple, who told me that the last thing he wanted to do, in the present circumstances, was pick a fight with a much bigger, richer church. I tried to see the emperor, but the chamberlain wouldn't even take my money. There are more important things, he said, with a sanctimonious scowl, and sent me away.

  I preached in the market-place. The first time, I drew a good crowd. I hadn't lost my touch. I told them; the Gospel of the Invincible Sun is a fake, written by five poor rich boys to make money. The so-called ancient scrolls dug up in the Temple foundations were fakes, made by a skilled forger with a criminal record for falsifying religious texts. The miracle of the Reborn Sun was no miracle at all; my former colleagues had started with Anaximander, carefully studied the other records, and accurately predicted a natural phenomenon that would have happened anyway. The cure for the mountain fever was just mouldy bread beaten up in garlic juice – a wonderful thing, granted, but no miracle. The other cures could all be explained by the scientificallydocumented phenomenon of mass hysteria; it was all there in the Mezentine books, I told them, all we did was read and repeat. The Herulian war was almost over anyway, so we hadn't ended that. As for the Church, it was nothing more than a mechanism for sucking in unearned wealth, which the five of us had always intended from the start to keep for ourselves.

  My second street corner sermon drew about a dozen people, five of whom jeered and threw apples. On the third occasion, I was arrested by the kettlehats for disturbing the peace.

  They kept me in for a week, in a dark, tiny cell along with two thieves, a wife-killer and a rapist. I preached to them, expounding the doctrine of right and wrong that I'd been given in my dream. I think the rapist was interested, but on the fourth day the wife-killer, a believer, hit me so hard I passed out, and when I came round, a lot of the evangelical zeal seemed to have faded.

  On the seventh day, two kettlehats came and pulled me out of there. I was being transferred, they said, to the ecclesiastical courts. What ecclesiastical courts, I asked.

  "They're new," Accila explained. He'd come to see me in my cell. "Very new."

  "How new?"

  "Actually, we got the whole thing set up in six days. Soon as we heard you'd been arrested."

  I stared at him. "What?"

  "In your honour," he said grimly. "On account of, there wasn't really

  anything in ordinary criminal law we could get you for, apart from disturbing the peace and criminal slander, maybe just possibly incitement to riot. At best, those would get you put away for two years. So, we created an entirely new jurisdiction, just for you. They had to rush an emergency enabling bill through the House; quickest piece of legislation this century, apparently. The emperor signed it yesterday, so it's now the law. And of course it's –"

  "Let me guess. Retrospective."

  He grinned. "Not much point otherwise." He sighed, a reasonable man brought to the limits of his patience. "Eps, you bloody fool, why can't you just drop it and shut your face? You've lost, accept it, move on." He hesitated, then added; "They've authorised me to make you an offer. One million stamina, provided you leave the country and never come back. That's for old time's sake, we don't have to pay you anything. Well? What about it?"

  "And if I won't?"

  He looked very sad and grave. "Well," he said, "I don't see where you leave us much choice. But for pity's sake, Eps, you're a sensible man, there's absolutely no reason why we can't sort this out in a reasonable, businesslike fashion. Damn it, we used to be friends."

  I just looked at him. "You're the ones who had me locked up," I said. "You threw me out of my own Church. I'm sorry, but I can't see how it's my fault."

  He shrugged. "You don't want money," he said. "You don't want a quiet, prosperous life. For crying out loud, Eps, what do you want? A martyr's crown?"

  So they were going to kill me. Oh, I thought. "If the crown fits," I heard myself say.

  "You bloody idiot," Accila said, and left.

  The trial was short and, as I understand, very orderly and efficient. I wasn't actually there, having been ejected for gross contempt about ten seconds after they put me in the dock. They sent some clerk down to the cells to tell me the verdict. Guilty of blasphemy, twelve counts, fraud and embezzlement, ninety-six counts, other offences, a hundred and four counts. Sentence; death by fire. I'd pleaded guilty, apparently.

  "Death by fire?" I asked.

  The clerk nodded briskly. "Only the refining power of flame," he told me, "can purge the taint of blasphemy, which would otherwise form a miasma and lead to plague."

  "Is that right?"

  "That's what it says here," he said. "Tomorrow morning, at dawn. Sorry," he added, which was nice of him.

  "I'd like to see a priest," I said.

  "Sorry."

  I spent the night on my knees, in prayer. Sounds ridiculous, doesn't it, but you do that sort of thing in a condemned cell. After all, why not? Not as if there's anything better to do, sleeping would be a sinful waste, and – well. If it was true, and I really had invented God, brought him into existence – I thought about that. Why not? There are innumerable examples of sons who turn out to be a thousand, a million times better, cleverer, stronger than their fathers. If I really had invented God, then I reckoned he owed me; a vision, a visitation, a sign or portent at the very least. No dice. I fell asleep kneeling.

  I woke up, and it was still dark. The floor was shaking.

  We don't get earthquakes in the City. If you want to experience that sort of thing, you have to go to Permia, or up North. It's the weirdest feeling. It's like being on a ship in a storm. You have to keep moving your feet just to stand still, and the vibration goes right down and through you, till you can feel your bones moving. Everything blurs, as though you've just had a bang on the head, and there's this noise like nothing else, a sort of deep rumbling purr, as though you're a flea on the back of a cat the size of Scheria. I jumped up, promptly fell over, got up again; I was trying to learn how to stand upright on a moving surface when the floor split, right between my feet, and a huge gap appeared – a great big slice of nothing, with a foot on either side of it. I yelped like a dog, and then a chunk of the roof came down, missing me by a whisker. I could feel pee running down the inside of my leg. Then there was this extraordinary singing, moaning noise, which later on I was able to rationalise as the sound of steel under intolerable tension, and the doorframe burst. The cell door actually flew open – it swished past me, if I'd been a hand's breadth closer, it'd have swatted me like a fly. A head-sized chunk of roof bashed me on the shoulder; it hurt like buggery, I staggered and nearly went down the hole in the floor. The hell with this, I thought, and I did a sort of standing jump through the open doorway.

  I landed on my bruised shoulder, which really didn't improve matters, and sat up. One end of the corridor was blocked with chunks and slabs of fallen roof. The other end was clear. I scrambled to my feet and ran. The floor played funny games with me, I ended up flat on my back three times before I reached the stairs. They'd pulled away from the wall on one side, but I was in no mood to be fussy. When I was a few steps from the top, I felt the whole lot give way under the pressure of my heel; I sprang, like a cat, as the staircase just sort of fell away, and landed in a ball on something relatively solid.

  It was a miracle that I got out of there. About ten seconds after I burst out through a shattered window into fresh air, the whole prison sort of folded in on itself and subsided into a heap of stones. How come I wasn't squashed by
any of the huge slabs of flying rubbish, I simply don't know. All I remember was how hard it was to breathe, because I couldn't stop running, even though my legs were jelly and my lungs stabbed like knives; I ran, dodging falling trees and collapsing buildings, jumping over dead people and people trapped under things, I ran and ran until a particularly violent tremor swept me off my feet and I fell down and no effort on my part could make me get up again. Then, I guess, I went to sleep, or something like that.

  I woke up in a weird landscape; masonry trash, blocks of stone, as far as the eye can see; I remember thinking, whatever possessed me to spend the night in a quarry? But then I caught sight of a building I knew; the Integrity Rewarded, in Sheep Street, except that Sheep Street wasn't there; just the Integrity, taken out of context, floating serenely on a sea of rubble.

  I limped over and banged on the door, but it was bolted shut. Pity. I could really have done with a drink (except I had no money, and they don't do credit at the Integrity.) I wandered away and just sort of drifted for a while. It was a very long time before I saw anyone, but when I did, it was a patrol of kettlehats. They looked at me and shouted, You there, stop where you are. So, naturally, I ran.

  The great earthquake of AUC 552 was exceptionally violent but extremely localised. It shook down the whole of the Potteries district, so that only a handful of buildings were left standing, but was hardly felt at all in Cornmarket, East Hill or the Grand Crescent. Remarkably, given the scope of the destruction, only about two dozen people were killed, and eight of those were prisoners in the gaol awaiting execution.

  I holed up in the Charity & Austerity in Pigmarket; a haunt of my youth, where nobody ever asks you anything so long as you have at least ninety trachy. I had considerably more than that, courtesy of some poor dead man whose pocket I picked on my way out of the ruins. I could have afforded enough of the house red to kill a regiment of dragoons, but oddly enough I didn't touch a drop; I had a bowl of soup and half a loaf of grindstone bread, and that was all I wanted. I think I coped really rather well with the realisation – it came up on me like a sunrise – that the earthquake had been for me – an intervention by my God, the Invincible Sun, to get me out of prison and save me from the flames. Well? What other possible explanation can you think of?

  I could have been horrified, torn apart by guilt at the thought of the deaths and the damage. Or I could've been really, really, really smug; God loves me so much, He shook down a quarter of the City just for me. I was neither. I accepted what had happened; not my fault, not a victory or a vindication. He knows best, I told myself; if that's what He felt needed to be done, who am I to question?

  Have you ever been to Eremia? I thought not. If you were thinking of making the trip, take my advice, don't bother. There's nothing there except sand, rocks, murderous heat, biting winds, freezing cold at night. I can only think of one man in the history of the world who wanted to go there, and I have a shrewd suspicion that at the time, he wasn't quite right in the head.

  Looking back, I can't understand how I survived. I was out in the desert, just walking. I had nothing, no shoes, not even a water-bottle. On the third, or was it the fourth day, I stumbled across an oasis. I call it that; there was this brown puddle, fringed with tall, thin trees. There was a rock with a sort of ledge, you couldn't call it a cave; under the ledge, I found a dead man. He must've been there for a long time. His skin was brown and hard, like rawhide. His eyes had gone, but his hair was mostly still there; thin, wispy, like the strands of wool you find caught on brambles. He was curled up, asleep. When I moved him, he was as light as a log of rotten wood.

  We had many long conversations, the dead man and me. He told me he was a pilgrim, on his way to the celebrated desert oracle at Cocona. He'd gone there to get the answer to a very important question which had subsequently slipped his mind; the answer, though, was, Yes, but it will not end well. Looks like they were right, I told him. Well, of course, he said, it's a very reliable oracle.

  I did most of the talking. I told him my story; how I'd created God, how He'd outgrown me, moved away from me, how He'd rescued me from prison and fire; but these days He never comes to see me, He doesn't even write – that's how it is, the dead man said, they have lives of their own, what do you expect? Of course, I said, and I know how busy He is, but it'd be nice if He could spare me just five minutes once in a while.

  "Here I am," the dead man said. "What can I do for you?"

  I looked at Him. "Sorry," I said, "I didn't recognise You there for a minute."

  "That's all right," He said.

  "Well?" I asked Him. "Are You keeping well? Are You eating properly?"

  "I am the Invincible Sun," He said. "I don't eat."

  Fair point. At that moment He was everywhere around me, burning, a white heat blazing down from the sky, rising up from the hot sand. "What do You want me to do?" I asked.

  "You've done so much," He said.

  "That's not an answer."

  He had no eyes, but they were filled with pity. "I want you to go to the City," he said. "Give yourself up. Submit to the cruelty and hatred of our enemies. They will put you in prison and they will hang you, and when you die, all the sins of the world will die with you. You don't mind, do you?" He added. "If you'd rather not, I'll understand."

  "No, that's fine," I said. "Is there anything You want me to say?"

  "Tell them that you were wrong," He said. "Tell them that the miracles were true miracles, that it was I who cured the sick and ended the war, that the scriptures are My holy word, that I saved you from the prison and I sent you back. Tell them everything is true, and everything is good, and that motive is irrelevant, only the outcome matters. It's essential that you tell them, and that they understand. Will you do that for Me?"

  "Of course," I said. "Anything else?"

  He smiled. "I think that's quite enough to be going on with. I will send others, later, to do the rest."

  "It doesn't seem very much," I said. "Go home, give up, tell a few lies, get killed. Are you sure there isn't more I can do to help?"

  "Nothing that you're capable of doing," He replied, not unkindly.

  "Well, if you're sure," I said. "Can I ask you something?"

  "Fire away."

  "Why me?"

  He smiled. "Why did I choose you as my high priest, out of all the people in all the world?"

  "Yes."

  "You mean you haven't –" He stopped, grinned, composed His face. "Your name, of course."

  "My name?"

  "That's right. Eps eps. Joke."

  I looked Him in the eye. "I don't believe it."

  His gaze rested on me like the noonday sun, bright and intolerable, so that I couldn't help remembering Anaximander. "Are you seriously suggesting," He said, "that God has no sense of humour? Now, there's blasphemy."

  "But it's not even particularly funny –" I stopped. I was talking to a dessicated corpse. Ah well, I thought.

  * * *

  Later that day, a caravan of salt traders on their way to the coast stopped at the oasis. They were amazed to find anyone there. They said they ought to kill me, for stealing their water, but since I was a lunatic and a holy man, they'd overlook it just this once. I explained that I had to get to the coast as quickly as possible; I have a message from God, I told them. Of course you have, they said.

  I didn't feel much like talking on the long walk to the coast, but they wouldn't leave me alone. How did you survive, they asked; how did you manage for food? I told them I had a vague memory of eating beetles, or something of the sort. They laughed and shook their heads; no beetles in the desert, they said. I shrugged. The Invincible Sun must have sent them, I said, so that I wouldn't starve. They gave me an odd look. Your god sent you beetles to live on, they said, that's pathetic. Would it have killed Him to send you sausages and honey-cakes? I thought about that for a moment and said, I think He must have sent the beetles, because clearly there weren't any living there under normal circumstances. I saw no sign that in
sects had attacked the dead body. What dead body, they said.

  Two kettlehats were waiting for me at the quay. For some reason, I was in ridiculously high spirits, that end-of-term feeling I hadn't felt since I'd walked out into the sunlight after six days in the Examination Halls, at the end of my last year at the Studium. I waved to the kettlehats as I walked down the gangplank. They looked at me.

  "I'm Eps," I said, before they had a chance to open their mouths. "Sorry, Father Deodatus, if that's the name on the warrant. Are you here to arrest me?"

  "No talking," they said. "You're with us."

  They had one of those closed carriages; a pity, because I'd have liked to look out of the window. It was a bright, sunny day, and the City is always at its best in sunshine; it brings out that deep honey yellow in the stonework, and sparkles on the copper roofs of the temples. I've always admired it; that day, knowing what I did about the Sun, I could understand. It was because He loved the City so much, the buildings and the people looking at them. I was proud of Him for that.

  * * *

  They must have known well in advance that I was coming, because everything was ready. They'd built the scaffold in the Golden Square, presumably so that the nobility could watch from the windows of their town houses without having to come down and mingle with the common people. For them, the imperial carpenters had built seventeen (I counted them) rows of bleachers, which only goes to show that the moaners are quite wrong and the government can get things done quickly and well if it sets its mind to it. On the outskirts there were the usual mulled wine and hot sausage stalls, quite a few other traders – I noticed a man selling quality imported textiles, and another doing a brisk trade in commemorative pottery figurines. Three squadrons of the Household Cavalry added a touch of that colour and pageantry we've always done so well in the City. I couldn't tell from where I was whether they were charging people for admission, but I'd be surprised if they weren't.

  A kettlehat captain in a magnificent gilded breastplate took charge of me and led me through a cordon of dismounted guardsmen to the scaffold steps. I asked him, "Will I have a chance to make a speech?" He shook his head. I was disappointed. I had a message to deliver, after all, and I was surprised to find that no opportunity had been provided. How about a priest, I asked. Shake of the head. But I want to confess my sins, I told him (we were getting closer and closer to the scaffold), I want to tell the people that I've seen the error of my ways and urge them to love and obey the Ecumenical Council. Sorry, he said, and then we were there.