The Race for God

by Brian Herbert

  Her orange-robed companion stood near her to one side, looking at the spot Orbust had vacated. One of Singh’s hands rested against his scabbard.

  “I guess because he was wearing it,” Zatima offered, “and Appy said we could bring aboard what we were wearing.”

  Singh didn’t appear to be paying attention to the conversation.

  “Orbust must wear a bullhorn,” McMurtrey said.

  She shrugged, said, “Many strange occurrences.” Then, with a flowing, heavily accented throatiness: “In answer to your inquisitive gaze, I am a follower of the Prophet Isammed, Prince of the Faithful, last and greatest of the prophets. No offense to you, of course.”

  “No offense taken,” McMurtrey said. “Despite what’s been said, I don’t consider myself a prophet. I simply carried a single message, one I can’t say I understand. I know something of your fine religion.”

  She smiled, didn’t ask him how he knew.

  “I have seen photographs of paintings depicting the life of Isammed,” McMurtrey said. “And the Prophet’s face is never shown; it always has a veil over it. How is it that you dare to go and look upon the face of Allah?”

  “That painting style came about because artists were fearful of showing inaccuracies in either Isammed or His family, and because they did not wish to be sacrilegious. I journey to see Allah because I received a calling to do so. If Allah’s prophet, Isammed, were on this very ship I could look upon Him, and a glorious sight it would be! So too do I expect to gaze upon the beloved countenance of Allah Himself.”

  McMurtrey furrowed his brows, wondered how a woman could occupy an important position in Isammedanism, as seemed to be the case here. Weren’t women forced to occupy lowly positions in that faith, hiding behind veiled chadors in public? He wanted to ask her about this, hesitated.

  It was apparent that Zatima had fielded such questions before, and she took this one before it crossed McMurtrey’s lips: “I see you are puzzled,” she said. “I am a rarity, it is true. American-born, I have lived in desert lands. I am directly descended from the first Zatima of note, the one who was daughter of Isammed and ancestress of the Isammed imams and Sivvy caliphs. Through this ancestry and my rather assertive personality, I gained the respect of the leaders of my faith. I am one of the only female imams.”

  “Very impressive.” McMurtrey tried not to sound patronizing.

  “When you made Allah’s announcement, I recognized the truth and caught the nearest camel.” Her eyes twinkled. “A car, actually. It took me to the hypersonic airport, and here I am. I joke only a little about the camel, for I ride on occasion. My people are not technologically advanced. There is much poverty and sickness, much hope that I might bring help to them from Allah.”

  “You are Sivvy?”

  Her eyes flashed proudly. “I am. And my direct descent from He Who Walks in Grace is integral to the legitimacy of all Sivvy imams. Sadly, millions who profess Isammedanism are misguided—Unnis, Ahhabis, Noddiyyas and even Tufer mystics. Allah will straighten them out.”

  “Some Unni sharifs of the Al Khalil family are descended from Isammed as well,” McMurtrey said, to impress her.

  “And they are traitors,” she snapped. “I follow the only true way.” She spun and went to her bunk, followed closely by the orange-robed Nanat Singh, who subsequently continued on past her to his own adjacent bunk.

  Hit a nerve there, McMurtrey thought. Peculiar alliance between those two. What religion is that guy, Nandu?

  McMurtrey recalled certain facts about the Sivvies. They had been followers of fanatical leaders over the centuries, including Isammed Rashid (1st Century), Ayatollah Rafakhom (2nd Century), and Ismail al-Muntazar (late 2nd Century, exiled to Ranus.) Sivvies rioted wildly against Wessornians before formation of the Inner Planet League. They even whipped themselves in public, bizarre displays purportedly designed to diminish themselves before Allah.

  But this woman did not seem fanatical, and thus far McMurtrey rather liked her.

  Punctuated computer tones filled the P. A. system, followed by Appy’s accented voice: “Assembly in one hour. There are separate meeting rooms, and you have been divided into cells: Sublevels A, B, and C. Room assignments are on display now.”

  Without thinking, McMurtrey glanced at the wall screen on his headboard, where he had seen book-tape tides listed. In red-on-amber he saw this:

  Assembly Room B-2 Report in 59m, 42s

  The last number represented seconds, and these clicked away silently on the screen.

  In the three weeks since the “dispatchings”of prisoners from Santa Guininas, Gutan had labored long hours, traversing many miles of Wessornia. Very early one morning he lay awake staring into the darkness of his sleeping compartment. The track-trailer sped along on autopilot, with occasional fragments of light finding their way into his room. He was somewhere on Coast Route 990 heading north.

  There had been stops at penitentiaries in Sohigh, Port Landis, and Lava Bend. This last was a complete bust, as all eleven Death Row prisoners there obtained cyanide and administered it to themselves in a suicide pact only hours before Gutan’s arrival.

  According to a Federal penitentiary system rule, this removed the fresh cadavers from Gutan’s jurisdiction, which normally would not have made him happy. In this case, however, all were men, so he hadn’t been deprived of an icy bed partner. He had his standards, he told himself, and only mature female cadavers would do.

  He preferred 5.7 minutes of quick chill in the truck’s cooler, a setting he had arrived at through extensive experimentation. Fresh cadavers were like fine wine, to be handled in precisely the right way.

  He hadn’t made this up himself. There was an underground morticians’ society known as Nouveau Silencius, connoisseurs of the freshly dead. They held regular clandestine meetings attended by expert speakers, at which members learned the ancient ways and rituals of the society. Gutan first become acquainted with the organization when he worked at his family’s funeral parlor, through a young man who drove a hearse for them. It wasn’t anything Gutan ever discussed with family members, and the only ritual of the society he ever adopted was the sex act. He had lost touch with the society but still liked to consider himself a member.

  What a crock, he thought, trying to lend respectability to what I do. Blast it, my libido is out of control! It’s deviated from deviance, taken me into a realm I’m ashamed to discuss with anyone.

  But Gutan’s libido surged just thinking these things. The last movements and expressions of his victims remained clear in Gutan’s mind as he made love to their lifeless forms. They had been alive and looking at him only moments before.

  There had been a male corpse one desperate, lonely night in Central Eassornia. It hadn’t been a gratifying experience, and afterward Gutan slept fitfully. He’d awoken in predawn darkness, feeling unclean.

  Now he felt that way again. If he were exposed, society would call him a monster, a depraved necrophiliac. He agreed with that assessment, but it didn’t help him control the urges.

  Urges! God, do I have urges!

  He recalled reading the definition of necrophiliac in an unabridged word-processing program. They defined it in a detached way as “an erotic attraction to corpses,” and referenced psychiatry without applying a value judgment to the condition.

  Sometimes it seemed to Gutan that he could do as he pleased in the privacy of his own bedroom. These prisoners had to die anyway, and he didn’t do them any real harm. He wasn’t a murderer! He might even have done the chosen corpses a favor, sending them from this world to the next with an act of love.

  But was it really love? Of course not, he admitted to himself, sitting up in bed in the tiny sleeping compartment. These were not consenting adults.

  He heard a faint and distant whirring, beyond the hum and drone of tires and engine, and this distant sound troubled him. When he attempted to concentrate on it, the sound hid like a crouching cat melting into shadow. Whenever he gave up the effort, the sound
came back, and it hung there at the edge of his mind, like a bangle beyond the reach of a child.

  It was like something he forgot to do, or forgot to consider. His mind raced, preventing sleep.

  The amber-on-black mapscreen adjacent to his bed indicated that the Dispatch Unit was on autopilot, negotiating Route 990 between Bakerville and Nosalia. He lifted the Venetian blinds by his bed, saw pixtel poles and fences flicker by. He heard a radar blip, and at the bottom of the mapscreen saw the truck’s speed drop from 185 k.p.h. to the speed limit: 140 k.p.h. Presently a Wessornia Highway Patrol car came into view in the truck’s headlamps, parked on a shoulder just over a rise.

  Passing the car, Gutan saw a panel of instruments inside, with dancing blue and red lights. Soon he lost sight of the vehicle, and in the ensuing moments didn’t hear sirens. He let go of the blinds.

  All Dispatch Units could be driven manually or automatically-and Gutan did the driving about a tenth of the time, depending upon how bored he felt. When he drove, he knew that the autopilot was watching his every move, ready to go into operation if he made a mistake. He had made a few, sometimes caused by the opium he took, and always the rescue came just in time. He called it “the cavalry.” Mnemo was too valuable to be left entirely to human error, and he surmised that the autopilot probably had its own backup. Gutan worried sometimes that he would be called on the carpet for his driving record, for the mistakes that had to be documented somewhere in the computer system.

  The microwave dish on top of the trailer brought in fifteen thousand televid channels, but a person could stand only so much of that. And Gutan didn’t enjoy book-tapes, word-processor video games or music. He only enjoyed intercourse.

  Intercourse, he thought, laying his head back on the pillow. Didn’t that word mean the union of two individuals? He returned to the troubling question of consenting adults.

  What might he call his act? It wouldn’t be phrased so nicely in dictionaries or journals of psychiatry. Solocourse? But that seemed more appropriate to something else entirely, and he laughed sardonically.

  The truck negotiated a turn, began the ascent of a steep hill.

  Such troubling thoughts, and that elusive sound. The vibration hung there, toying cruelly with him. Was it like the resonance emitted by Mnemo, the one that brought forth images of strange geometric shapes? He couldn’t taste enough of it with his ears to tell.

  Why was he thinking this way?

  Gutan swung out of bed, pulled open the door of his sleeping compartment. Mnemo was straight ahead, bathed in the lambent yellow light that suffused its walls. The wide instrument console and the separate government-installed computer were dark shapes—the former a rectangle against the illuminated machine, the latter a nearly square box off to one side.

  How like the government, Gutan thought, to employ such an unimaginative square shape for its computer. Professor Pelter’s Mnemo, in comparative majesty, was a graceful pedestaled pentahedron with an oval door on its sloping front face.

  Out of the darkness before Gutan’s alternate, nonphysical eye came the vision of a sound, in great leaping, darting hunks of orange and lilac Mobius shape. They spun inwardly upon themselves like living, moving neon images, stretching into every imaginable Mobius shape. The square shapes pranced across triangular and circular ones, and like cubs or kittens playing, they switched roles. They blended, bounced from one another, and ultimately stretched to synchronized roundness—a roundness that was barely perceptible to Gutan.

  Now the sound came as noise through this alternate non-physical channel, as from a great unobstructed distance where an event is seen before it is heard. It seemed to be Mnemo’s, the peculiar characteristic whine of the Mobius bands, and he felt its magnetism entering the pores of his body, drawing him forward, luring him.

  But Mnemo, seen to Gutan’s physical eyes, had grown dark, and to his physical ears it made absolutely no peep. Previously he had recognized a division of sight—of the physical and nonphysical eyes that looked into different worlds, and he discovered now that the same separation existed with respect to his hearing. He had an alternate ear to go with his alternate eye, and conceivably there might be other alternate senses to go with these. He was hearing and seeing in a different plane of reality.

  The realms were overlapping in certain places, folding over upon themselves to make him aware of them.

  Mnemo flashed on in both planes, and to all of Gutan’s eyes the machine became a brightly illuminated polychromatic blend of geometric shapes that floated within Mnemo’s wall panels. Each shape was a different, delicious color, with an integrity of its own that at times showed clearly and at times slipped beneath or atop other shapes, forming odd combinations of shape and hue.

  He saw no Mobius strips now.

  Gutan had imagined many times what it might be like to enter the machine, and in a sense this seemed like just another vision, a dream. But when he attacked it with this thought, he realized it was a form of reality he had only touched tangentially before. The speculations and estimations of survival odds he had made concerning a trip through Mnemo came back, and they seemed entirely meaningless to him.

  Everything seemed meaningless, even what lay beyond Mnemo’s door.

  The oval door swung open.

  Gutan regretted his behavior, felt his acts were tearing at the core of his life, shredding the source of his energy. He became conscious of his unbathed, opium-saturated odor and nearly gagged. If only he could rid himself of the guilt, if only he could escape the trap his life had become.

  In one oft-imagined scenario, he would enter the machine only after setting it to operate for a certain number of minutes, after which it should automatically shut down. Mnemo had many controls and combinations of settings of unknown purpose, and in the short period that Gutan had worked at this job he had figured some of them out. The combination he thought might activate a timer involved two pick buttons, a brass toggle and a dial, all with numerical designations. Somehow they were tied in with a narrow black screen that ran vertically along the right outside edge of the instrument console.

  Once he had mistakenly pressed a button after setting another button, a toggle and a dial according to instructions from HQ, and the narrow black screen went on briefly, clicking off red numerals in hundredths of a second like a stopkron. This set off error lights and buzzers on the adjacent government computer, and had the effect of shutting Mnemo down. Gutan had to repeat the procedure they wanted.

  Gutan felt like a person who had received an elaborate electronics package without an adequate instruction manual and with no way of sending for one since the manufacturer was out of business. In this case the manufacturer was not only out of business, he was out of commission—killed in his own machine. This gave Gutan pause.

  Professor Pelter had known the most about Mnemo.

  As Gutan stared into the interior of Mnemo, he felt fear and suspicion. He wondered if this might be part of the clandestine government experiment, turning him into a subject in the dark of the night. But to what purpose? Gutan couldn’t offer data beyond what they might learn from other subjects.

  Maybe they had been playing psychological games on him to make him want to enter the machine. Maybe voluntarism was a yet untested variable, an important one.

  Or maybe he had outlived his usefulness, especially if he knew too much. This could be the normal retirement method for Mnemo operators, the reason for turnover in the department, which had led to him getting the job. Could it have something to do with his trysts? Mnemo had become an execution machine, and Gutan was a criminal by the standards of society.

  But one deserving death? He thought not.

  The machine grew closer. Its lights and patterns became brighter, larger. Gutan didn’t think he was moving his feet. The motion of approach was too smooth, as if his eyes were camera lenses zooming in. He couldn’t look down, couldn’t move his head or eyes to look at anything except the mesmeric, dancing lights of Mnemo.

  He
was moving forward rapidly, but the passage seemed to take forever. Mnemo became unfocused, disappeared, and Gutan seemed to penetrate the glowing yellow place where the machine had been. To the rear without turning his head to look, he saw Mobius bands in varying sizes and configurations chasing him. He felt short of breath and cold.

  The bands caught him, and the twist in each adhered to his body and spread gelatin over him. He felt a spiked tingling, saw electrical waves, cycles and pulses all around. As Gutan lengthened the distance between himself and Mnemo, the Mobius bands straightened and became a billion parallel lines, joined impossibly at the point of Gutan’s body.

  Gutan could hardly breathe. He was spread-eagled on a huge platform of white lines that knifed and accelerated into an inky abyss. Fear enveloped him.

  He was traveling toward a far off pinpoint of light at a speed that jellied his mind. The light did not change size, but he reached it nonetheless and merged with it. The light was so intensely hot that it melted his body and everything that clung to it.

  But something remained of Gutan. He heard the familiar whine of Mnemo, and saw a flash of brilliance that shifted from lilac to orange. Once again he saw the pinpoint of light from the abyss, and he was on a plane of parallel lines speeding from the light. He became as he was, as he came to realize he had always been, and pleasantly warm. The shortness of breath passed.

  All was silent.

  He lay dreaming of a dreamer, and that dreamer dreamed of another dreamer, and these were part of an infinite sequence of dreamers, all locked in to Gutan. He sensed an expansion of memory: blank spaces became turgid with events, too many events for one life. Ancient instincts became identifiable and subject to scrutiny, not just intimations controlled by the subconscious.

  He had no subconscious anymore. All events and motivations had surfaced and organized themselves before him. They lay as objects on a great platter stretching across the universe. He was about to pluck one and examine it, when this image vanished, and he felt his body folding inward.