The Race for God

by Brian Herbert

  This was the lunatic who said he knew where God was.

  “Is it true that the Bureau of Loyalty has approved your spaceships for takeoff, Mr. McMurtrey?” the reporter queried, extending a microphone cautiously.

  “Well, I haven’t actually been in touch with any BOL people,” McMurtrey said, uneasily, “but a reliable intermediary informed me today that the Bureau is staying out of this.”

  The reporter shook her head, smiled. “I’ve counted half a dozen red and gold Bureau guncopters in the area, every one of ’em undoubtedly brimming with electronic gizmos. You can bet undercover agents are crawling all over this place.”

  McMurtrey shifted on his feet. He appeared uncomfortable at the reporter’s candor.

  In the background, Orbust saw an almost uniform fleet of spaceships, described in recent news accounts. They extended far into the distance in a most unusual straight line, with some perched precariously on frameworks over building tops or straddling streets, as if the whole bunch had been set down indiscriminately from above. They were fat ships of nearly the same size and shape, like big ripe pomegranates with nubby points on top. Some were bright and shiny red, others glistened varying shades of yellow and orange, and others were white. There appeared to have been some consideration for the town beneath the ships, for wherever a building top, fence, or other structure lay beneath, the underside of the craft had been custom-fitted with a shiny metal landing platform that straddled the structure without touching it, so that the weight of the ship actually rested on the ground.

  “For those who tuned in late,” the reporter said, “tell everyone again where you’re going with these ships. I’m still having a hard time believing this.”

  “We’re going to see God!” McMurtrey responded ebulliently.

  The reporter faced the camera, and it zoomed in for a close-up of her face. “There you have it, Inner Planet citizens,” she said. “Shortly after Mr. McMurtrey’s historical announcement of God’s location, a fleet of ships appeared in his town from out of nowhere, apparently ready to go. Who will fly them? The Grand Exalted Rooster does not know. Only God, it seems, has this information. No explanation has been tendered as to how the ships got here, but the fact remains that they are here. I have touched their outsides, and they are not apparitions. Something very unusual is occurring here on the Wessornian coast.”

  Orbust focused on the nearest ship visible, a white craft behind the reporter, and as the picture changed he held the image of the ship in his mind. It looked familiar, inexplicably so, and he felt particularly drawn to it. Despite its apparent similarity to the other ships, there remained something materially different about this one, something intriguing and magnetic.

  He had to touch it.

  Within an hour, Orbust was on his way to St. Charles Beach by airbus, having exchanged his wife’s stash of household money for a note.

  Chapter 2

  The concept of my memory machine “Mnemo” came to me in a dream that provided a complete vision of the device, its name and its operation. For a long while before, I had postulated a collective genetic memory in mankind, going back to antiquity—one that fired electrochemical impulses along imprinted brain routes, causing people to war repeatedly in the same tragic ways. My theory explained deja-vu and the instantaneous love or hatred people felt for one another, for old emotions never died. I longed to prove that each human life created an overlay of events in the collective brain, a track over old tracks, and that with each new tracking old incidents slipped further into an individual’s subconscious. Ancient events were just beneath the surface, and I needed to find them. The miracle of my dream revealed how! A subject connected to my mnemonic machine could carry us back in his memory to the earliest twitchings of all life. Inevitably that had to lead to the Creator Himself, if He existed, and to the singularity of explosion whence the universe began.

  —Notes of Professor Nathan Pelter,

  League Penitentiary System Archives

  A short distance inland from St. Charles Beach, a shiny-black truck-trailer with no chrome or markings slithered along the winding road to Santa Quininas Federal Penitentiary. It was shortly past sunrise, and the rig’s tinted windows reflected the day’s first rays of sun. The rig came to a stop outside the main gate, hissed its brakes. A guard in magenta and brown armor stepped from his booth and waved a transmitter baton at the heavy iron alloy gate. The gate swung open toward the interior of the compound, and the truck went through.

  Harley Gutan parked the Dispatch Unit in the same spot as always, by the heavy alloy door that led to Death Row. Wondering how many prisoners would be dispatched this time, he activated the electronic clip pad on the seat by him and noted twenty-nine names.

  He felt cold pain in an airspace where a severed little finger once had been, before a childhood tricycling accident. Sometimes he moved the missing finger as if it were in an unseen dimension, even touched it with his other hand and felt it. Now he tucked the affected hand between his flank and the seat cushion, to keep the finger warm.

  Why did it get so cold?

  In the Inner Planet League, prison authorities no longer executed people with gas, electricity, hanging, lethal injections or Damoclean body crushers. Not since Professor Nathan Pelter left his machine to the Inner Planet League when he died. It wasn’t designed as a killing machine, so the story went, but it worked admirably to that purpose, dispatching prisoners on a fantastic journey as they died.

  Gutan was a Dispatcher, a euphemistic title selected for public relations purposes.

  Pelter had died in his own machine, and rumor held that he went out with a broad smile on his face. An accidental death, some said, but there were other theories extrapolated from rumored personal problems. It was said that his unusual machine could not be opened for servicing or adjustment without destroying it and all of its secrets, and that it couldn’t b ‘rayed to see its mysterious inner workings. It was one-of-a-kind, and had to be moved between numerous truck-trailer rigs like the one Gutan was in.

  So far, to Gutan’s knowledge, the machine had required no servicing by the prison system. And it had been used extensively in the half century since Pelter’s death, with inmates brought from all over the solar system to facilities accessible by the truck-trailers. There was an order out that the prison system was not to risk flying the machine, based upon statistics proving that these special trucks were the safest means of transport.

  None of the criminals that Gutan “dispatched” died with a smile, although some entered the machine that way. A standard tough con’s sneer, usually. Gutan had seen it often. But there was nothing standard in the way they died. Always they screamed before it was over, with death masks twisted into nightmare hideousness.

  If Pelter went out with a smile, Gutan thought as the cab door slid open, he must have been one tough son of a bitch. Either that or he hypnotized himself.

  “What’s new and exciting, Harl?” a guard of about Gutan’s height asked, coming around the outside of the truck.

  Gutan stepped down from the cab and grunted a barely civil and purposefully unintelligible acknowledgment. He touched a button on his Wriskron, locking the truck and setting the vehicular alarm system. With a second press of the button, a light on the time dial flashed pink, indicating the alarms were operational.

  The air was cool, with the ground still in shadow and early rays of sunlight glistening from the highest points of the guard towers.

  The magenta and brown of the guard’s armor matched the prison-system shirt and trousers Gutan wore. The guard’s armor was thin but sturdy, of a new and arcane alloy that light artillery projectiles could not penetrate, not even those How-How-tipped, exploding microparticle shells. There were matching helmets, but guards refused to wear them because of razzing from prisoners. It was an act of perceived manhood to go around without a helmet, and it struck Gutan that guards and prisoners were to a great extent of one ilk. He didn’t trust any of them.

  “Show me the n
ew batch,” Gutan said, staring at the door to Death Row. “My schedule is tight, and I want the dispatches ready when the system goes online at seven A.M.”

  St. Charles Beach was a low-lying town just off the old Bluepac Highway that skirted Wessornia’s coast in those days. The town attracted its share of vacationers, mostly in-staters from big cities to the north and south. Its swimming beach was privately owned by one family, the Domingos, and they also owned the general store, the gas pump, and a recreational vehicle campground (Domingo’s Reef) that stretched north of town along the dunes.

  “No parking” signs were everywhere, as if the place were a breeding ground for them, and they were posted in eclectic unfriendliness by the Domingos and almost everyone else who owned property. One sign that stuck in McMurtrey’s memory like a bad song depicted a ferocious, red-bearded cartoon character holding a hogleg handgun. The caption: DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT PARKING HERE.

  It cost twenty javits to get into the swimming beach, seventy-five javits a night for the RV facility, and a visitor couldn’t even leave a car in the store parking lot to take a half hour walk. Tow trucks lurked in alleyways and shadows like hulking muggers, waiting for opportunities. One Domingo son-in-law held the towing concession. He was also the sheriff, a one-man town council, and the local judge, so towing abuses couldn’t be appealed.

  “A cutthroat town,” McMurtrey called it. But he had grown accustomed to the place, even liked it now during the winter off-season. Winters on the Wessornian coast hadn’t been cold since earlier in the century when three of the continent’s biggest volcanoes went off. The locals got their town back to a great extent at this time of the year . . . except for the parking situation, which irked most everyone at one time or another. At least the locals didn’t have to deal with surly, chiseling old Mr. Domingo for supplies, because Faberville was only a couple of miles inland. Prices were better there, and there weren’t any “no parking” signs.

  As McMurtrey looked out of his living room window, he saw the multicolored pomegranate-shaped flying ships assembled in a long, straight line from the northernmost tip of Domingo’s Reef right through the center of town, across building tops, in iceplant-covered yards, and in streets. Throngs of people milled around the ships, waiting to see what would happen next.

  They looked like movie extras at an employment hall, so diverse was their raiment. Most were men, some in traditional white or pastel robes, with the long beards and sandals or shaven heads of ascetics. Others resembled ferocious warriors, with sharply cut beards and weapons that hung at angles from their hips—swords, pulverizers, guns, knives and stunbows. Still other men resembled royalty, with gold-trimmed, jewel-encrusted robes, long coats and tiers of jewelry. There were numerous turbans, in a panoply of folds and colors.

  The women were nearly as impressive in range, including nuns in plain white or black cotton habits alongside weapon-toting musclefems in flak-resistant jumpsuits. There were even those who could easily have passed for princesses or queens, bedecked as they were in exquisite long gowns with high, swirled coiffures. Some women came to town in elegant landaus, drawn by robotic horses, while others had come long distances on foot.

  Life insurance robots worked in the midst of all this, selling flight insurance to people who thought they were going on the journey.

  Thus far no one had been able to open a ship’s hatch, and despite entreaties from some that he try, McMurtrey hadn’t done so. He had a feeling that he could get into any one of them if he wanted to, and that others . . . only certain people with certain ships, the ones they . . . It wasn’t clear.

  McMurtrey occupied a special position, and realized for the first time as he gazed out on the town that he was one of the few that God had ever selected to deliver messages to mankind.

  I am a messenger of God, he thought. A prophet?

  Several of the ships were white, and one that stood nearest to his bungalow held his attention most often. Sometimes he caught himself staring into its whiteness hypnotically, and when this happened he couldn’t recall how long he had been so engrossed. He felt curiously soothed when he finished looking at it, and coming to consciousness was not unlike awakening from a good sleep.

  McMurtrey assumed that these were ships, despite their rather unaerodynamic, pudgy shapes. Each vessel had a nubby pointed tip at the top, exhaustlike vents at the bottom, an exterior hatch, and flight-deck-type windshields way up near the top. The ships were too high for a person on a lift truck or ladder truck to see inside the windshields, and thus far McMurtrey had only seen Bureau of Loyalty guncopters and hoverplanes near the ships at that height. The Bureau knew something, and it disturbed McMurtrey that he hadn’t heard anything directly from them.

  How did the fleet of ships get to St. Charles Beach, and were they really going to transport people to God? A number of people theorized they were full of aliens or Outer Planet warriors, prepared to leap out and carry humans off into subjugation. Some felt the ships ran automatically, with computer-controlled drive systems or robopilots. Others subscribed to none of this: The ships had no controls, no crews, no robots, and were there simply because God willed it so. The last theory seemed easiest for McMurtrey to accept, although paradoxically it was the most illogical and difficult to explain.

  Not even Old Man Jacoby, a stargazer and the most nocturnal person in town, had seen or heard the ships arrive. They were just there for everyone to see and marvel at when the sun came up one day. Reportedly, Jacoby only shrugged his shoulders when asked how it could have happened.

  Old men doze off, McMurtrey thought. Or their minds wander. He must have missed something. . . . What an understatement!

  McMurtrey recalled a game he and a friend used to play as children in Ciscola, when they walked over cars instead of around them, denting car tops in the process. They were thoughtless acts, recalled to mind by these ships, the way they had set down wherever they pleased—atop buildings, yards, vehicles, spanning streets. But the ships had platforms that prevented damage to anything. Even Domingo’s Video Palace with its high marquee was straddled without damage. This suggested a degree of courtesy as well as flexibility, and phenomenally rapid construction technology.

  Look at all the parking violators, McMurtrey thought, scratching the back of his head. And not a tow truck in sight. It amused him to think of the insidious Domingos and their vulture trucks, with no way of hauling off spaceships. No doubt the Domingos were in touch with their lawyers, ready to ticket God if they dared.

  McMurtrey’s pulse quickened.

  He gazed upon the throngs of people and life insurance robots knotted around each ship, and a sensation rushed through his brain. He closed his eyes momentarily, and when he reopened them he squinted and was able to distinguish the pious from the onlookers and hangers-on, for he detected a slight, barely discernible pale yellow aura around some, those he sensed were the pious. A sensation of Great Wordless Truth enveloped him, and he barely got an angle on it. He tried to concentrate, felt the concept slipping away.

  He knew those with auras were the pious, the ones who truly belonged here. Some of them wore white, black, saffron or other raiment of various religious orders, and others wore common everyday clothing, as anyone on any street might wear. These pious comprised only a small proportion of those present, but in the distance, on the road winding down the rocky hillside to town, he saw more approaching on foot—the followers of many religions. Their bodies glowed slightly, a pale yellow, and McMurtrey felt like a man wearing infraglasses, seeing things that others could not or should not see.

  Three deer watched from a safe distance on a hillside, then scurried up the hill and disappeared into a cluster of sycamore trees.

  The dunes and flatlands around Domingo’s Reef were covered with tents, and locals were beginning to call that area “Tent City.” Only a few recreational vehicles were visible.

  McMurtrey knew he would have to face the multitude sooner or later, explaining God’s message to the extent that
he could. One answer was awakening in his mind as he stood looking out on the town, and he was beginning to feel that he could explain why everything was here, in St. Charles Beach.

  It’s because I’m here, he thought. The white ship—something special about it for me. Why?

  Tremendous energy had been channeled through his mind in recent days, from the aura people. Strangely, despite knowing this viscerally, he felt no fatigue. Adrenalin pumped through his veins, kept him charged. But he felt rising trepidation, an onrushing fear that people would laugh at him.

  He had been going around in public with a chicken on his shoulder for years, letting people think him odd, letting them talk as they wished about him. None of it bothered him before, because it had all been a great big private joke. He didn’t think he cared what anyone thought. Now it seemed to matter, and he wished he hadn’t appeared on televid with No Name.

  He should go before the public now and make them take him seriously. It had to be that way, almost by definition, for he was carrying a momentous holy message.

  He had asked God about that, if religion was supposed to be serious, and the response hadn’t really answered the question. God asked if religion was really the way to reach Him, and He phrased it rhetorically, as if it wasn’t the way.

  God had chosen him, dammit! People wouldn’t dare laugh at him, not with the evidence of God’s power all around, not with the auras, even if only McMurtrey could see them. These were good people, and . . . but some carried weapons.

  It was another problem of definition. Religious people had auras, or at least it was said the holiest did, the saints and prophets. The aura concept seemed almost hackneyed to McMurtrey, too pat, and this was troublesome. Didn’t people only see auras in imagination, in strange visions?

  With so many theological representatives appearing at his doorstep, McMurtrey feared some were there to show him up, to prove him an infamous fraud. He might go out and bluff his way through for a while, taking full credit for the fleet and asserting that this miracle was an affirmation of the Interplanetary Church of Cosmic Chickenhood. But this facade wouldn’t last long if God intervened.