The Race for God

by Brian Herbert

  The universe stretched to infinite smallness.

  The whine of Mnemo returned, and it seemed to come from Gutan’s own throat. He sat within an infinite mass that enveloped every pore, with only the vision of Mobius bands all around and the bodily sensation that he was sitting in weightlessness.

  “Am I dying?” he asked. It was a thought without words or throaty texture, without tangibility. But it came forth nonetheless.

  No answer ensued.

  He saw a tiny key turning in a gigantic doorway, and an elongated light switch that flicked to “On.” For an instant he heard music, a peculiar, jaunty tune.

  A whirl of faces, landscapes, buildings and colors filled his mind, focusing momentarily before fading. Then a single blurred vision held, and. presently an image became clear: a white sand beach, with turquoise blue water stretching to the horizon. The images shifted, as if seen from a person walking, but Gutan felt no corresponding body sensations.

  A large log loomed ahead, half embedded in sand, and around it were footprints, human and dog. A woman in a yellow calico dress moved gracefully across the vision, sat on the log. She was extraordinarily lovely, with porcelainlike skin and long black hair that streamed like a gleaming mane in the ocean breeze.

  Gutan’s pulse quickened. He knew this face, or an approximation of it—an older version, he thought. Faded photographs were dim in his memory. It was his mother in her youth, the way he had seen her only in photographs.

  How was he seeing this?

  Then the realization hit him, as if he’d been clobbered with the big beach log: My father! I’m . . . I’m in his mind!

  He knew this from the way his mother looked toward him, with the wan, loving expression she always reserved for Gutan’s father.

  They embraced, and eagerly the man pulled the dress and underclothes from the woman, revealing untanned, firm breasts and a birthmark on one side of the stomach. They rolled off the log onto her clothing, made love with animal frenzy.

  Their lovemaking was like an eternal storm of creation and the surging power of the seas. Great undulating, pulsing waves and tides throbbed incessantly, rising and falling in an aquatic thunder of movement. Presently it became as the gentle rhythmic movement of water, turning eventually into a sea of smooth glass, calmness beneath the heavens.

  Gutan saw the waves of the sea marching shoreward, like endless battalions of soldiers . . . retreating and advancing, ever-punishing the surface of the planet, wearing it away over many eons. With his father’s eyes he turned and looked up at the hills along the shore, realizing that all of this would give way someday to the relentless forces of the sea and its ally, the rain.

  In his mind, Gutan saw the cycles of oceans, rivers and lakes that condensed through sunlight into clouds, bringing invincible rain that battered mountains flat over millions of years. His vision became a single drop of water, teeming with microscopic life. The drop splayed into an ocean, with dead and decaying materials moving to the upper strata of water. Sunshine streamed in to provide the feeding substances for floating and drifting plants, and the plants in turn were fed upon by tiny floating and drifting animal organisms. Small fish and crustaceans received nourishment from the animal organisms, and they in turn nourished the larger life forms. It was a self-reproducing cycle of life and death, with death and decay integral to the continuance of life.

  He realized that the beauty and majesty of birth could never exist without death.

  It was a cosmic energy dance, of vibrating molecules, atoms and quantum particles that pulsed briefly, became still, pulsed again and became still once more, ad infinitum, in a perpetual rhythm of the ages. The old made way for the new.

  Gulls cried out, swooped gracefully over the lovers, and flew out to sea across blue-green water. Gutan felt drawn to follow the birds in their majestic flight, to soar with them toward the horizon.

  Gutan felt he shouldn’t be here on the beach with his parents, that he was uninvited, an intruder. His mother and father had always seemed so sedate and passionless, like the corpses in the mortuary at which the family toiled. Gutan always had trouble imagining that his parents ever made love, and if they did, it should have been a reasoned, controlled procedure, nearly clinical. Certainly not this furious, primitive outburst.

  A feeling came into Gutan’s loins, and a surging explosion of red bonded the man and woman. The image faded, and presently a new one took its place. Someone in a room, standing naked on a green and brown Floriental carpet. It was a bedroom, with the mahogany leg of a bed occupying the upper right corner of his frame of vision. He looked down on a belly, bloated and with a birthmark on one side, but beautiful even so. It was his mother’s belly, in pregnancy. Gutan swooned.

  Foggy, unidentifiable images slid slowly through his brain. He was a lifeboat in a raging rainstorm at night, fighting to reach the safety of a shore he couldn’t see. He wasn’t in the boat; he was the boat, and his plight angered him. He had a right to make shore, and this storm dared to interfere! He reached a point where he had to float across a narrow waterway, and something pushed him, aided him.

  He found himself lying on his side in a small room illuminated by a single bulb. Inexplicably the bulb threw shadows on the wrong side, against the wall behind it, and Gutan picked out his own boat shape from others. He became a child, small and coughing water from its lungs. Something hit him in the center of his back, hard. A switch beneath the bulb spun without being touched, and the glow of light dimmed sharply but held for a fraction of a second, as if between realms and protesting the passage from light to dark. Finally it succumbed, and Gutan tumbled through blackness.

  Something hit him again and he cried. He faced a dawn sky that was a spectacle of golden orange against eggshell blue. From far away, a rooster crowed.

  His eyes followed the subtleties of change in the new day’s sky, and he felt his senses tingle. He beheld an ancient day, felt the permanence of cosmic eternity and the fragility of flesh.

  Remnants of the stormy night dwindled in his memory, scattered by the loveliness he beheld. It seemed to him that endings were strung together with beginnings, that events could be recaptured and replayed, made right where they had been wrong.

  He saw a turreted playhouse on one side, in a backyard he used to roam, in days when the yard seemed so large that he must have been small. The dark-haired woman came into view again, his mother on the steps of the old house that was later torn down. She wore a sleeveless white dress, and called to him without making a sound. The house vanished, and she stood silhouetted against eggshell-blue sky.

  He rode a tricycle on the front driveway, going around in circles. Faster and faster, threatening to tip over, at the brink of possibility. He had all his fingers then, before the accident.

  A car horn bleated.

  Suddenly he was rolling backwards on the tricycle, circling much faster than he had gone forward. People, faces, and flashes of color whirred by, carried in the whining wind of Mnemo. His tricycle evaporated and he was a helpless baby once more, thrashing his arms and crying.

  His mother and father appeared, and they spoke to him in an inexplicably familiar, ancient dialect. Gutan cooed and babbled, and his utterances blended perfectly with theirs.

  It was a hundred centuries before Krassos, when Gutan’s father, Tyrus, was in command of one-of the ships in Hanno the Magnificent’s Dartellian fleet. Gutan’s father spoke of distant islands, and he carried a small pouch full of Dartellian coins.

  Gutan was known as Ahiram then.

  They were exquisite golden coins, and Ahiram was allowed to touch one. It glinted like sunlight from every angle, and the smoothness of its surface was incomparable. He became older, a boy holding the coin again. It belonged to him now, and he set it on a piece of cloth. He was at a table with his parents and a faceless sister, and he tasted the sweet boiled cabbage and heavily seasoned roast goose his mother had prepared. He dipped emmer wheat bread into pungent mustard paste and stared into the face that
wasn’t a face.

  Something in the mustard. He couldn’t get enough of it. As he devoured all in sight, his sister’s head became a skeleton skull seen from the back. He heard weeping, and images fled so rapidly across his brain that they left a trail of pain.

  He absorbed the flavors and odors of baked river perch with sour grape tartar sauce . . . of ostrich eggs, ghee and curly leaves of endive . . . of lemon wedges and a pungent coriander paste mixed with Afsornian honey . . . of crisp ta-bread and sweet camel’s milk. He was no longer of Dartellia, no longer of that place or time.

  He was the nameless ancestor of those people, and he looked through billions of eyes at them and at the future not so far beyond, where Gutan sat in a mnemonic memory machine. It was the dream of a dreamer again, the tricycle in circles backward and forward. It was hope. He was on the beach once more with his parents, in the explosion of color from his father’s loins, and this event was at the center of everything.

  He radiated outward from an infinitesimal point, like wavelets from a flung pebble, and he locked in place in the mind of the little man in the machine.

  From there he receded again with screaming, uncontrolled speed, to the hoary ancestors of ancestors, and their memories threatened to burst his cellular structure. Panic swamped him. He tried to direct his hands to remove the seat harness and breathing tube, and his hands seemed to move. But nothing changed. He wanted to scrape all the filthy, electrically conductive gel from his body!

  He had to escape the rampaging machine! He screamed, an echoing howl through the deepest chambers of existence.

  Wars inundated him, and he relived lives in microseconds. He was mutilated and died countless times. Red and gold Bureau of Loyalty officers goose-stepped over him, trampled him. Black-uniformed troops followed, their battle medals and weapons glinting in the sun. They gave way to blue legions, and waves of banner-carrying religious fanatics, and barbarian horsemen and more legions, and scabby armies with catapults that hurled fireballs. They rolled on without end, across the flaming horizons of every planet. They buried continents in fire, muck, and water. He believed the entire history of civilization was flashing before his eyes as he died, as Professor Pelter must have seen it.

  A robed man knelt outside a burning city, cradling a dead girl-child in his arms. Gutan was the man, in dirty, bare feet, and his heart pounded out of control.

  From the edge of the planet, approaching inexorably, came mindless masses of marching armies, feet beating rhythmically. They came in rainbow uniforms with a cacophony of metal raspings and poundings.

  Clump-clump-clump! Clump-clump-clump! Clump-clump-clump!

  From behind the armies hurtled a giant platform of parallel white lines that skimmed over their heads, swooped across their path and dipped one corner near Gutan. He stepped aboard with the girl-child and instantly their bodies dilated across the entire platform. They were spread-eagled, facing one another eye to eye, life touching death. Gutan saw through the dead girl’s eyes in reverse, penetrated the back of her skull to the armies beyond.

  Clump-clump-clump! Clump-clump-clump! Clump-clump-clump!

  Gutan and the child were larger than the armies, and on their platform they flew circles over the armies, swooping low and scattering them in all directions.

  The platform knifed into the sky and away, with Gutan and the girl.

  The dead eyes were all Gutan could see. They were motionless and disconnected from their sockets, with cells flaking and falling away. He wanted to press his body tighter against hers, to feel the receding warmth of her life. But only a faint tracing of the eyes remained of her.

  The image of her eyes receded and he couldn’t remember what they looked like. A familiar throbbing began, where his severed finger had been. Cold, ever so cold. Gutan saw the planet behind him in greens, browns and blues, and armies were regrouping there. Icy pain shot from the finger void up his arm, into his brain. It was worse than ever before, beyond enduring.

  He screamed.

  Gutan’s platform spun away and hurtled with him into dark infinity. He barely made out a pinpoint of light in the frozen distance, far, far ahead.

  Chapter 6

  It is possible to see from one universe to the next, but only from the bubble of a skinbeating entity. Skinbeaters travel by whipping along the microthin electromagnetic skins that separate universes, and in so doing they occupy tiny portions of both universes at once. The process creates an invisible bubble around the entity, a bubble that is a vibrating window between the universes. Life forms contained by the bubble can see into either universe, and no portion of the bubble interior is inaccessible to them. When skinbeating ceases, the bubble dissipates and the skinbeating entity slips off track into the universe of origin.

  —Teachings of Tananius-Ofo,

  Crystal Library, Vol. 25

  It was not quite mid-morning, and McMurtrey made his way down a spiral staircase toward Assembly Level B. The stairway was adjacent to an elevator bank, but for short ascents and descents McMurtrey preferred stairs. His elbow was much better now, and he hardly thought about it.

  Partway down the steps, McMurtrey had to lunge for a handrail.

  The ship jerked violently, first one way and then another.

  With considerable effort he made it to a landing, and from there the ship ceased its aberrancy and he progressed at a regular pace down the remaining steps, keeping one hand on the railing.

  He passed through a doorway into a wide corridor. There, in the midst of a knot of people, Johnny Orbust and Zatima were engaged in spirited debate over the role of women in religion. Orbust contended that women belonged at home, and he quoted the Apostle Nop from IX Thicor:

  “‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law.

  “‘And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.’”

  “That’s your religion, not mine!” Zatima shouted.

  “It’s no different from yours. Nop also speaks of the veils women must wear, and the fact that women wear their hair long as a natural veil before God.”

  “My hair is short!”

  “And you are an abomination, an evil mutation!”

  McMurtrey saw the shiny silver Snapcard in Orbust’s hand, though Orbust tried to conceal it by clutching it tightly.

  “My denomination, the Sivvy, is very progressive,” Zatima said. “It is correcting the mistakes of men.”

  “According to Haria, your holy/civil law, a woman is only worth half a man on the witness stand. It takes the testimony of two women to counter the testimony of just one man. Why hasn’t that ‘mistake’ been corrected yet?”

  “It will be,” Zatima said. She appeared uneasy, didn’t seem able to counter Orbust’s Snapcard-boosted knowledge. Apparently she wasn’t aware of the card.

  McMurtrey saw weaknesses in each side. If he mentioned the card to Zatima, that would shut Orbust down abruptly. But Orbust had a gun, and he seemed unstable. McMurtrey recalled as well his own conversation with Zatima, when she admitted being a rarity in her religion. She stood in quicksand, arguing the rights of women in her faith. But McMurtrey dared not criticize Zatima either, for she had that Nandu, maybe ParKekh, warrior with her. And the hand of this one always remained near his sword.

  McMurtrey continued on to Assembly Room B-2, arriving there a few seconds before the appointed time. He found a middle-row seat, among three rows of bolted-down chairs, arranged around an expanse of empty floor at the center. The room was uncarpeted, and the chairs had no cushions, creating a cold austerity.

  Across unseen speakers, Appy’s tones seemed particularly harsh as he listed the names of the tardy.

  McMurtrey noticed Kelly Corona already seated, changed places to be next to her.

  They compared experiences, learned that each had been saved by a tether during takeoff. In hushed tones, C
orona informed him that she had heard Appy and Shusher arguing with one another, one into each of her ears. She told him of the lavender light from the wall opening in the strange room, and of her suspicion that one bathed in this light became privy to the private comlink between Appy and Shusher.

  “If everything isn’t a monstrous farce,” she said, “I’ve been bathed in holy light.”

  “Weird,” McMurtrey said.

  “I’m hearing them again!” she whispered. “They’re still arguing!”

  McMurtrey couldn’t hear anything other than Corona and the voices of the pilgrims in the room.

  “I’m getting a better sense of what Shusher is saying” Corona said excitedly. “From his tones, I think. Somehow I know he’s saying that Appy’s personality stinks. He’s calling Appy an asshole!”

  “Appy does have a difficult personality,” McMurtrey agreed.

  He watched Tully slip into a front row seat.

  “Shusher whines—that’s his language . . .” Corona fell silent, and she had an intense cast to her eyes.

  “What’s wrong?” McMurtrey asked.

  “I just . . . I just realized what Shusher said before I tumbled out of the lavender-lit room! It was an angry whine that ebbed and flowed . . . no way to duplicate the sound for your ears. But now I know what it meant!”

  “Yes?” McMurtrey leaned toward her.

  “He said, ‘Silence!’”

  “Then it’s just as Appy said: Shusher requires quiet.”

  “I was past the off-limits signs Appy warned us about—on the highest mezzanines. I must have made intrusive noises across their comlink.” She paused. “They’re at it again. Shusher just said something I can’t make out, I guess it’ll get easier as I hear more. Appy is responding that Shusher is more stupid than a camel. They really despise one another. You felt the ship being jolted a few minutes ago?”

  “Yeah. I was in the stairwell.”

  “That was them fighting over the speed controls. Appy was madder than hell, said if they went too fast it would damage the skins between universes, whatever that means, and T.O. would penalize them. They call God T.O., for Tananius-Ofo.”