The Race for God

by Brian Herbert

  Zatima condemned Appy in a loud, outraged tone.

  Makanji said the computer must be malfunctioning.

  The nuns whispered between themselves.

  The Hoddhists’ eyes were huge, staring saucers.

  “Aw shove off, you pack o’ hypocrites!” Appy raged. “Actually that eighteen-hour advantage could guarantee me a pleasure-disk bonus for getting my cargo to God first—-if we don’t run into any other delays. God decided I had nothing to do with what happened, so He isn’t going to penalize me. He warned me, however, that if I’m not alert to dirty tricks, if I don’t do my duty to prevent further damaging actions like that, I’m not going to qualify for the prize. So whoever did it, you’re an asshole, but thanks anyway.”

  “What kind of morality is this?” Makanji asked, his rage barely under control.

  Appy laughed wickedly. “We’re in a race, you jerks! This is God’s competitive event, His pastiche on the clamoring, competing usurpers that sentient creatures have become . . . I’m competing with other biocomputers aboard the other ships, and each biocomputer has an idiotic Shusher-type entity with which to contend. Shusher and his breed are invisibles called Gluons, able to negotiate the fragile skins between universes, which are the shortest spaceways to God. It’s called skinbeating. For reasons unrevealed, time is of the essence, and God wants the racers to reach Him quickly.”

  This biocomputer needs to have its personality reworked, McMurtrey thought.

  “Why does He want us there at all?” McMurtrey asked.

  “Again, unrevealed. Shusher and other Gluons are masses of energy, proteins and amino acids . . . perfect hosts for channel-synthesized creations. Shusher could be a ship as he is now, or could be something altogether different, if properly channeled to be that. My theory is that we are united—human, biocomputers and Gluons—because each of us have in our sentient states become overly competitive.”

  “But aren’t you an apprentice, an assistant of some sort, to God?” McMurtrey asked. “You sound like you don’t know everything that’s going on here.”

  “Does any apprentice? This is part of my training process, just as it is part of yours and part of Shusher’s. I do not know if I am apprenticing to become God, for the form of God is not programmed into me. In fact, I do not know what I’m apprenticing to become.”

  Appy laughed wildly.

  The test I suspected we were being put to, McMurtrey thought. But it’s unlike anything I imagined.

  “Are we representative humans?” McMurtrey asked. “Are we supposed to carry some message back to D’Urth?”

  “My assignment is only to rush you to God,” Appy replied. “Information such as that, since I don’t have it, must be in another repository, perhaps only with the Lord Himself. Anyway, as I said, shove off.”

  “Why do you behave so erratically?” McMurtrey demanded. “You’re unpredictable and odd.”

  “Am I?” came the response. And the biocomputer embarked upon the longest, insanest laugh of all, a cachinnation that chilled McMurtrey to his core.

  Orbust, Tully, and the Greek Hetox pulled at the door handle, trying to get out.

  But the door held firm against all their efforts, combined and separate.

  “Get back!” Orbust barked to the two with him. He drew his gun. “I’ll get us outa here!”

  Tully scurried away, hid behind a chair.

  “My pulverizer rifle has more power!” the Greek Hetox shouted, sliding his weapon out of the sheath on his back.

  People were scrambling to hide behind chairs. Others sat motionlessly and dispassionately, in apparent oblivion.

  “Can you set the projectiles so they don’t ricochet?” Orbust asked.

  “No.”

  “Then you’d better not use it in this confined area. My gun has an anti-ric setting. It’s gonna be loud, so everybody cover your ears.”

  The Greek hurried behind a chair, and crouched there with his palms pressed against his ears.

  Orbust emptied his gun into the door latch, filling the room with a deafening noise.

  The door still didn’t budge.

  Orbust reloaded and cut loose again.

  The result was the same, and now McMurtrey’s ears were ringing, despite having kept his pinkies in them during the barrage.

  Orbust sat on the floor by the door, removed his holster from his belt and spread the holster open, revealing a narrow white strip inside, along with a shallow, clear-plastic box that held a bunch of little red pellets.

  “What do you have there?” Corona asked.

  “Chemstrip.”

  “Did you buy that from a door-to-door salesman?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “So it’s illegal. Haven’t you heard? The Bureau of Loyalty says no concealed weapons may be carried by any person without a BOL permit. You have a permit?”

  The color drained from Orbust’s face. “Nobody said anything about one. The salesman told me it was BOL-sanctioned, and that’s all I know. Say, who are you to be asking about that? With your comments about the Bureau, you’ll be picked up and put away.”

  Corona smiled. “Did the salesman show you any documentation?”

  “No!” Orbust was openly frightened.

  “Salesmen lie.”

  “I’ve been carrying this setup around without knowing! Innocently!”

  “Tell it to the BOL,” Corona said.

  Orbust looked like a man already arrested and executed, a convicted enemy of the state.

  “Don’t worry,” Corona said. “The Bureau can’t touch you out here.”

  Nervously, Orbust rubbed the fingers of one hand together like insect legs, then peeled open the box cover and removed three pellets. “Something I prepared for the occasion,” he explained. He wedged the pellets inside a crack between the door and the jamb, clamped a thin black wire onto the pellets.

  Gathering his kit, he ran for cover, diving behind a chair.

  This got the attention of the oblivious, and almost everyone took cover in the same manner.

  Someone got slapped in the ensuing moments, apparently by the nun with the squeaky voice. She accompanied her blow with a stern scolding, “Don’t pinch me, you nasty man!” Since this occurred somewhere out of McMurtrey’s view, he couldn’t tell who the offender was. But he heard him scuttling away.

  Corona, on the floor by McMurtrey, looked at him and giggled.

  A tremendous explosion rattled the room, causing McMurtrey’s already ringing ears to throb and ache. There was no smoke, no perceptible odor, and when McMurtrey looked tremulously over the chair, he saw Orbust running for the door.

  But the door remained closed and appeared undamaged. When Orbust tried to open it once more, it still refused to budge.

  “Shit!” Tully said.

  Then Orbust made Tully apologize to all present for his language. This seemed curious to McMurtrey, for Orbust packed dangerous weapons and had essentially kidnapped McMurtrey for a time. Anyone who would do those things shouldn’t feel any compunction about using foul language.

  To McMurtrey, Orbust was an enigma. But in a perverse and muddy way, Orbust fit into this eclectic gathering as much as anyone else.

  McMurtrey was convinced that all the pilgrims were students engaged in an unparalleled learning process.

  Students took tests.

  Might this locked room be one, and the disgusting language of the computer another? How were the participants supposed to react to such things?

  McMurtrey’s ears were feeling better, the ringing having diminished.

  He and Corona resumed their seats.

  “I’m back,” Appy announced. “God programmed me and I am not experiencing malfunction. I can swear any damn time I feel like it, you pack of whining, sniveling butt-licking hypocrites! God informs me that many of you use colorful language privately, that you even regularly take the Lord’s name in vain.”

  Appy lowered his voice. “You do worse things, too, don’t you?”

&nbs
p; Now Appy displayed his laugh, and a perverse discharge it was. Not very loud this time, and halfway between an evil chortle and a belly laugh, it was interspersed most surprisingly with snorts, as if the effort were causing Appy’s sinuses to constrict.

  Do biocomputers have sinuses? McMurtrey wondered.

  Orbust stood by the door, looking frustrated and confused.

  Several attendees emerged from their hiding places and took seats or stood.

  “You, Sister Mary,” Appy’s omnipresent voice said. “A fine and laudable Dictine nun you are. But just the other day in St. Charles Beach you said a naughty-naughty when you stepped in a pile of cow fluff! And under your breath only moments ago, you called that Middist who pinched you a ‘brainless boob!’”

  “I did none of those things!” the nun proclaimed, in an indignant, squeaky voice. Her fat cheeks glowed red.

  The tall Sidic Middist smiled, and when Sister Mary saw this she became even more agitated.

  “We have more than a computer malfunction!” a woman lamented. “You people are out of control, pinching and swearing! Heaven help us, for you’re all crazy! We’re headed in the wrong direction, straight into Hell!”

  The Middist rabbi who had spoken of sneezes and blessings jumped to his feet, from the last row, opposite. His long black coat resembled that of the other Middist, but instead of a fur cap this man wore the traditional yarmulke. His beard twitched angrily.

  “That man is not Sidic!” he exclaimed. “The Sidic are orthodox, and among them extrafamilial contact between the sexes is strictly forbidden! No follower of that faith would pinch a woman!”

  “Certainly not in public anyway,” Corona said.

  The rabbi didn’t hear Corona, shouted: “There is more to being a Middist than appearance! I am Rabbi Moshe Teitelbaum of Jalley City. I do not always agree with my Sidic friends, with their ways of mysticism in particular, but I respect them. And this public sacrilege is an affront to all Middism! I do not need to check circumcision to ascertain your heart!”

  “Can it, Bozo,” the one under attack sneered. “I am Shalom ben Yakkai, born into a Middist family, but not a religious one. We are, in point of fact, strongly atheistic.”

  “I knew it!” Teitelbaum exclaimed. “Why do you dare dress so?”

  “I like the style.”

  “Remove those clothes!” Teitelbaum demanded.

  “In front of the women?”

  Teitelbaum sputtered something incomprehensible. His face glowed an unhealthy shade of red.

  “I’ve been fouled by the hand of filth,” Sister Mary whimpered, “May the Lord cleanse me!”

  “And shear those sidelocks!” Teitelbaum shouted.

  “May I keep my beard?” Yakkai queried, with a sardonic smile.

  The rabbi dropped into his chair, glaring at Yakkai.

  “I could divulge interesting tidbits about nearly all of you,” Appy said. “To one extent or another, you’re all selfish hypocrites.”

  “Oh, goodie,” Yakkai said. “Juicy gossip! Tell us everything, Appy!”

  McMurtrey glanced sidelong, saw Corona staring at him intensely.

  “Don’t mention the private channel we’ve heard,” she said. “Could be trouble over that.”

  McMurtrey nodded.

  “We’re in the clutches of the Antikrassos!” Sister Mary wailed. “We’ve got to turn this ship around and return to D’Urth!”

  “Impossible,” Orbust said. “We can’t even get out of this room.” He fumbled with his chemstrip, couldn’t get it to adhere to the door, for whatever purpose he had in mind.

  “Check for secret panels,” Yakkai suggested. “In the walls, the floor, the ceiling. Twist the seats.”

  “I’m with you, Shalom ben Yakkai,” the Greek Hetox said. “Well find a way, if there is a way.”

  McMurtrey thought about Yakkai, wondered how an atheist got aboard ship. It occurred to him that Yakkai might be a Bureau of Loyalty spy, made to look the buffoon to place him above suspicion. That might explain how he got past Appy, if Bureau influence extended beyond the solar system.

  “Maybe the door opens with a secret password,” someone suggested.

  No one paid much attention to the comment.

  Yakkai, the Greek Hetox, two of the Hoddhists in white, the nuns and the KothoLu archbishop were looking for secret panels. They horsed with the seats, trying to tilt them or twist them, and they pressed their hands against wall and floor surfaces, trying to trip an unseen mechanism. The men even stood atop one another’s shoulders to reach high points on the walls and the ceiling. It was a high ceiling, which required that the Hoddhists stand side by side on adjacent seats, with Yakkai on their shoulders.

  The three of them moved from seat to seat quite agilely and in formation, like circus performers.

  While they were interlocked in this fashion, a clatter of unseen machinery arose, and several of the seats disappeared into the deck, as if it were quicksand.

  Fortunately this did not include the seats upon which the three acrobats were supported, or any other occupied seats, and no one fell over. But it happened so quickly, in such a micro-portion of a blink, that neither McMurtrey nor anyone else had time to call out a warning.

  In the next instant this happened: The floor, walls and ceiling became as clear as the finest glass, so that assembly rooms above and below could be seen. Every room was full of pilgrims, and in each they appeared to be in similar states of disarray.

  McMurtrey saw Jin just below him, in the assembly room there. Jin, crouched over in his seat and naked, had what looked like a sheet of folded plazymer in his hand. Jin’s head moved right, then left, as if he were glancing in those directions. Jin drew his hand toward his belly, out of McMurtrey’s view. When the hand returned to view it was empty.

  Jin looked up, straight at McMurtrey, and Jin’s eyes were afire.

  McMurtrey’s heart skipped. He looked away, then back.

  Jin wasn’t looking up anymore. He stared straight ahead, and not a muscle twitched.

  What did he do with that plazymer? McMurtrey wondered. This guy is one of the strangest

  Yakkai found himself peering into the face of a wild, bearded holy man on the level above, a man who was writhing on the floor in apparent religious ecstasy when the fishbowl effect occurred.

  This so unnerved Yakkai, who must have thought for an instant that he was looking directly into the face of Jehovah, that he toppled from his perch and had to be saved from disaster by the quick, strong hands of Archbishop Perrier.

  “Not the first time a Krassian has saved an atheist,” Perrier quipped.

  Yakkai thanked his benefactor graciously and profusely as Perrier helped right him upon his feet.

  McMurtrey began to wonder how the chairs could have disappeared into the glass floor. His thoughts traveled to temperature change and various known means of metamorphosing matter. As he pondered, chubby little Sister Mary and a number of other women in Room B-2 noticed pilgrims in rooms below looking up their skirts. This caused considerable flurrying about and squealing, with many of the women tucking their dresses under them and sitting upon them on the deck.

  While this was happening, McMurtrey found himself intermittently staring up the skirt of a comely young woman on the level above. He saw pink underpants that were tight and frilly against her crotch and buttocks, and he felt an essential urging.

  Then he noticed a fellow near her who wore no underpants beneath his robe. This disgusted McMurtrey, and quickly he gazed back toward the young woman, who wore a white dress cut just below the knees. She had North-sornian features, was soft and pale of skin, with shoulder-length golden hair.

  She was like a dream, and he longed to be on the other side of the barrier.

  “Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Corona said.

  McMurtrey blushed, lowered his gaze.

  Yakkai was looking up too, in awe of the splendorous woman before him.

  Appy’s voice crackled into the room, filling McMurtrey’s ear
s with sound: “Don’t look up those dresses and robes, or God will strike you blind!”

  “I think I’ll risk one eye,” Yakkai said. He covered an eye with one hand.

  Finally the young woman noticed the attention she was receiving. She tightened her skirt about her and scurried to the comparative safety of a chair.

  When no bolt of blindness descended upon Yakkai from the heavens, riplets of nervous laughter began in the room. Soon McMurtrey, Corona and others were sharing in the glee and laughing uproariously. Despite their upbringings, despite their separate and often similar sexual codes, this experience transcended a great deal and relieved the stresses they had been feeling.

  Even Appy laughed in his demented way, across the speaker system. “Okay, so I was just kidding about blindness,” he admitted. “But from now on you’ll all obey me and respect me better.”

  Sister Mary, one of those who hadn’t participated in the fun, shouted angrily: “Antikrassos! May God strike you dead and return us safely to D’Urth!”

  “You speaketh to me?” Appy said. “If so, you might more cleverly have suggested that God fuse together my biocircuits or burn my binaries. I am not the Antikrassos, if such an entity truly exists, nor am I its representative.”

  “If it exists?” McMurtrey said. “What do you mean?”

  “So many questions,” Appy said, in a fatigued tone. “There will be time enough to learn, time enough to learn. Now, as to the door, B-Two . . . one of you suggested a secret password. Few of you paid heed to that remark, and a great pity that is. So much scrambling about searching for hidden panels! Oh my! A magic word is what you need. That, and no more.”

  “Please,” the nun in the black habit said, in the meekest of voices. Then, a little louder: “Please open the door.”

  The door swished open into the ceiling, where before it had swung on hinges. Like the missing chairs, the hinges seemed to have melted into another surface.

  The pilgrims burst from the room.

  Chapter 7

  There is a marked tendency for a person in proximity to any strong and popular group to become like that group: in dress, in thought and in all manner. Homogeneity is a powerful force.