The Race for God

by Brian Herbert

  Singh leaned over and removed Orbust’s belt and holster.

  “We will hold this weapon,” Zatima said, “until a proper judge has been selected to decide upon its disposition. You are not fit to carry it.”

  Unnoticed by her or by the ParKekh, Orbust’s chemstrip fell out of the holster, to the floor. The chemstrip was visible to McMurtrey for only seconds, when the bottom of a broom darted out from the crowd and then back. It was a lightning stroke, and when complete the chemstrip was nowhere to be seen. The Snapcard wasn’t visible, either.

  McMurtrey saw Jin in the throng, moving away from the center of attention.

  Why does Jin want those things? It had to be him . . . the broom . . .

  McMurtrey hurried toward Orbust to help him.

  “My card,” Orbust gasped. “Where’s my card?”

  “Does anyone see that card he was holding?” a man asked. No one responded.

  “Uhhhh, aaah!” Orbust groaned. “I need a doctor!”

  McMurtrey pushed his way through, knelt by Orbust and dabbed around his eye with a handkerchief. The eye didn’t look too bad, but the brow was badly split, dripping blood into the eye. He stopped the flow.

  Sister Mary and her companion Sister Agatha got through, and the latter cradled Orbust’s head. He wasn’t twitching anymore, but had a terrible grimace on his face.

  Archbishop Perrier shouted for Appy to send medical aid.

  “Is there a doctor aboard?” McMurtrey asked.

  “Processing data,” Appy reported. “Cannot locate infirmary or assigned attendants . . . all was in order at departure . . . processing . . . I don’t think we jettisoned anything like that . . . Shusher, did you? . . . Oh, here it is . . . an infirmary with no attendants . . . not my fault . . . ”

  “Hang who’s at fault!” McMurtrey shouted. “Just get us some aid, pronto!”

  “Sister Agatha and I are nurses,” Sister Mary said, “but we need supplies and a facility where we can handle the injuries.” She chewed at her lip, looked around.

  McMurtrey was perspiring at the brow, guessed that the close gathering of people was absorbing available oxygen. He asked them to move back, and most cooperated.

  “Oh, there you are!” Appy exclaimed. “Sister Mary and Sister Agatha are the attendants! Weren’t you informed?”

  Sister Mary shook her head, looked blankly at her companion and said, “No. We were just asked to be here, without explanation.”

  “‘Well, it was adequately explained to your bishop,” Appy claimed.

  Invited for particular tasks, McMurtrey thought. Like Corona, they must not have participated in the visual assembly of this ship.

  “Why aren’t you on duty?” the computer demanded. “You think this is a party ship, with no work to do?”

  “We’d be happy to report” Sister Mary said, with more than a hint of irritation, “if we knew where to go.”

  “Why didn’t you ask? You think you can just show up and have everything laid out for you?”

  It’s Appy’s fault, McMurtrey thought, judging from the intensity with which the computer was attempting to distance itself from culpability. This suggested a stern taskmaster above, one who didn’t coddle subordinates.

  “I showed up for work, Appy!” Corona yelled, from a short distance away. “You took my captaincy, gave me the runaround, broke your word! Now you’re chastising these gentle ladies for something they had nothing to do with? What kind of a crazy operation is this?”

  “Make yourself useful, Corona,” came the response. “Take these nurses and their patient to the infirmary. Level Sixteen, Corridor Two, the little room on the left with the caduceus on the door.”

  “All egress blocked,” Corona said, “as we’ve been telling you. Is your brain blocked, too?”

  “Get over to the patient, Corona! Now! Then I’ll, lead you by the hand, since that seems necessary.”

  Corona emerged from the crowd and went to McMurtrey’s side. Her forehead was creased in anger.

  “Out of the way, McMurtrey!” Appy commanded. “You’re slowing things down!”

  “Don’t jump on me! I was just—” McMurtrey stood up and moved aside.

  Corona, the nuns and Orbust disappeared into the deck, just as the chairs had done in their assembly room.

  “Magic!” a woman exclaimed.

  “The work of the Devil,” offered another.

  “No need to worry,” Appy said, with sudden cheer, “S.O.P.”

  “Standard Operating Procedure,” a man said.

  “Oh shut up,” another man said. “You think we’re a bunch of dodos?”

  Soon we’ll hear the hiss of gas, McMurtrey thought. But this thought humored him only slightly.

  McMurtrey experienced a wave of concern for Corona. This computer/ship combination was not operating at peak efficiency. Could Corona and the others have been jettisoned accidentally?

  The air in the corridor was stale, and several of the women complained of this.

  “Not to worry,” Appy said. “The ventilation will be operating presently. We haven’t lost a passenger yet!”

  That might bode well for Corona, and McMurtrey was about to ask for confirmation, when several pilgrims shouted that the corridor was open.

  McMurtrey became one with those around him, and like a segmented creature with a single brain, they rushed through doors that before had been closed.

  Just before he left the corridor, McMurtrey glanced over his shoulder and saw Room B-3 open, with more confinees pouring into the rear of McMurtrey’s throng. Miraculously, no one was trampled.

  Since no one had ordered him back to his cabin, McMurtrey took this opportunity to explore the ship.

  It was like the Shusher of old but off a bit as if dream-distorted, reshaped in ways McMurtrey couldn’t discern. He hadn’t been aboard that long; it was only the middle of the first day according to his D’Urth-oriented Wriskron. His visual memory often gave him problems, but the vessel seemed tighter and smaller, tracking with Appy’s comments. And while it didn’t seem to be stem-to-stern shorter (determined by looking up the airspace between mezzanines), it seemed to be of lesser girth. The airspace was narrower in diameter, and the curving partitions as well, and McMurtrey heard numerous people complaining about changed cabin numbers.

  The walls of some corridors boasted portholes in varying sizes, shapes and configurations. They appeared to be laid out randomly, and when McMurtrey had his bearings he confirmed that the window wall of Assembly Room B-2 faced aft on the ship. So mirrors and prisms must have been employed to view forward from that area, just as Corona had theorized.

  By peering through portholes, McMurtrey determined that the white lines remained outside and a good distance ahead of the ship. Behind, he saw only distant stars, not even the backside of the blue and purple nebula he presumed they had passed through.

  On Level 12, McMurtrey passed a black door that was ajar. He heard angry words coming through the opening, pushed the door open.

  The room was turgid with religious paraphernalia piled to the ceiling in bright red and yellow wire shelf-baskets. A number of aisles divided the area, giving it the packed arrangement of a remote general store.

  Partway down one aisle, a Nandu outcast and a Hoddhist were toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose. The outcast, who wore a white cotton dhoti, held a wooden alms bowl tightly in one upraised hand, and from the man’s hostile demeanor he appeared close to crowning the other fellow with the bowl.

  “That’s a Hoddhist bowl!” his adversary insisted, reaching for the bowl. But the outcast, who was taller, held it just out of reach.

  Down another aisle, a man in a black robe clattered through a pile of candelabras that were heaped loosely in a tall wire bin. “Damned cheap shit!” he snapped. Ferociously, he grabbed a handful of candles from an adjacent bin, and stalked toward the doorway.

  McMurtrey moved out of the way.

  “These will have to do,” the man with the candles said.

  McM
urtrey returned to the cabin assignment dispenser, where people were having their identifications rescanned and new cabin numbers assigned. He went through the process again, found that he had the same berth assignment as before, the “satanic” three sixes: Level 6, Number 66.

  He recalled Appy’s suggestion that he, Evander Harold McMurtrey, might be “the Beast,” might even be the Devil himself. No one had confronted McMurtrey on this or even suggested it to his face except Appy. But Appy had claimed that persons aboard were talking about it.

  He recalled Corona’s warning too: that someone might kill him over this. But he felt no fear, and this surprised him, for he had never considered himself to be particularly brave.

  Kelly Corona retained her previous cabin assignment, as McMurtrey discovered when he encountered her on Level 6 moments later. They theorized that this may have occurred in part because they were on the inner aisle, by the railing. But all around they saw evidence of altered assignments—spaces occupied where they had been empty before, and familiar faces either in different spots or not apparent at all. Jin was directly adjacent to McMurtrey now, whereas previously he had been four spaces away. Zatima and Singh were on the other side of Jin, still adjacent.

  Corona’s cubicle was open, bed down, and she was lying on the bed looking at the book-tape screen on the headboard, touching the control bar to scroll the listings.

  McMurtrey mustered his courage, stomped into her space and knelt on the deck beside her. She had a number of book-tape titles locked in on the screen. Every one had to do with sex.

  “Now look here!” McMurtrey said, in a low, urgent tone. “You and I are going to have it out! I—I don’t know how to handle the things you’ve been saying. You’re—you’re sexually harassing me!”

  “Your eyes harassed me,” she said calmly, without looking at him. “They harassed my breasts!”

  McMurtrey sighed. He gazed at people on an upper mezzanine level. She said I could, didn’t she, that if she hadn’t wanted me to, she would have worn a barrel? No use arguing with her . . .

  “You enjoyed staring at them, didn’t you?”

  “I told you, I hardly knew I was doing it. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was daydreaming.”

  My God, McMurtrey thought, trying not to act like he was interested in the titles on the screen. Tm actually speaking with this woman I’ve just met about her mammary glands!

  “Daydreaming? About what?”

  “I dunno. Stuff I can’t remember.”

  “Maybe it was about sex, or about your mother, or maybe, like that guy said at the meeting, you were like Reeshna, without a thought in your head.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Why don’t we drop the screen and talk some more? We could have a cup of coffee, sit at the table, whatever.”

  “I don’t think I should.”

  He glanced at her, saw a flash of hot temper in her eyes and looked away.

  “Obviously you’re bothered by my forwardness.”

  “Well, uh . . . ”

  “You don’t want to be bothered by it, though. I sense that.”

  McMurtrey’s face was warm, and he felt perspiration trickling through his eyebrows. He wanted to get away and didn’t want to get away. Ultimately he craved an experience like this, but he wanted it on his terms, at his initiative.

  “I’m not inviting you to a tryst, you know,” she said. “We don’t even have to talk about breast meat—a little chicken joke, if you don’t mind.”

  McMurtrey pursed his lips with displeasure.

  She smiled at her double-entendre. “I’m merely fascinated by the subject—women having these floppy appendages hanging on their chests where everyone can gawk at them and compare. It’s a sociological phenomenon you see, the way different cultures treat the subject. I see no point in acting self-conscious about them, and when I notice people staring at them, I sometimes bring the subject up to see what’s ticking in a person’s brain. I like to give people a hard time, I guess. It gets into psycho-cultural stuff. Men are lucky in one sense, being constructed in a less sexually conspicuous fashion.”

  You don’t wanna know what’s ticking in my brain, McMurtrey thought.

  “You probably think because I’m black I’m a hooker.”

  “No, I don’t, not at all. . . . “ He couldn’t look at her, felt his eyes burning. Had he thought that, given off signals? He didn’t think he had. But her tone made him feel guilty.

  “A little dark meat, eh? Is that what you’re thinking?” She chuckled.

  There seemed no end to these damnable chicken jokes!

  “Aren’t all black women hookers?” she said. “Especially those who openly discuss sexual matters with men?”

  McMurtrey shook his head. “I didn’t say or think that.”

  She scrutinized his expression. “Well, Mr. Mac, I’ll . . . ”

  “They call me Big Mac.”

  “Very well, B.M., I’ll have you know that I’m not certain if I ever want to sleep with you. Admittedly, I find something compelling about you. No rush of womanly passion, though. Sorry I’m so direct; I don’t like to waste time.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” McMurtrey was feeling a bit more comfortable, as if a crisis were passing. But she was slipping away, as others had before her.

  “Any time you want, let’s sit and talk,” Corona said, patting his shoulder. “As friends. We’ll be a long time in space.”

  “How about right now?” McMurtrey offered impulsively. His voice cracked, a sure giveaway.

  She smiled, swung around on her bed and tapped the main control panel. The screen dropped, and McMurtrey had to jump across the foot of her bed to avoid it.

  “Whew!” he exclaimed. “Does that thing have a safety?”

  “Who knows? Say, that coulda ruined your whole day, getting sliced in half.” She licked a fingertip, and with that finger smoothed the hairs of one eyebrow. “Actually, I checked it. There is a safety”

  They sat crosslegged on the bed, looking at one another, and he asked, “Why do you keep doing that?”

  “What?”

  “With your eyebrows.”

  “Oh, I hardly notice it anymore. My long eyebrows are always dropping down over my eyes.”

  “Why don’t you trim the damn things?”

  She tilted her head back, raised her eyebrows. “Keep forgetting to. Besides, wouldn’t that just encourage growth?”

  “Darned if I know. Could you at least stop doing that around me? It’s . . . quirky.”

  “Yeah, I guess. I’ll try to remember, if it bothers you. Say, what right do you have to even ask? We aren’t an item.”

  “Aw, forget it. It’s my problem, not yours. Before God spoke to me I had this condition where little personal mannerisms like yours distracted me real bad. So much that I’d get tongue-tied, couldn’t think my way out of . . . Anyway, I’d have to avoid certain kinds of people.”

  “Like me, the quirky ones.”

  “I’m not trying to insult you. Like I said, I have the problem, or I had the problem. It seems to have stopped, but I’m afraid something will set it off again and I’ll relapse.”

  She smiled gently, said she would try to do as he wished.

  “I have other problems too,” he said, “even more obvious ones. I’m fat, for one.”

  “You’re not fat! I like the way you look!”

  “I’m fat. I’ve tried every diet. I even took food-dreaming pills, the kind that are supposed to satisfy your beta-endorphin pleasure sensors while you sleep. I was supposed to wake up feeling full, and I did. But I ate anyway. My fat cells wouldn’t be denied.”

  Corona smiled mischievously, said, “See that little instrument panel over there on the wall?”

  “Yeah. Just like mine.”

  “It drops the bed, right?”

  “Yeah. You already did it.”

  “It’s a berth control panel.”

  “Huh?”

  “Berth. B-e-r-t-h.”

  “Oh
.”

  “Could have a bearing on b-i-r-t-h, too.”

  “You’re silly! Don’t think I missed that B.M. comment, either.”

  “Hey, what else is there to do out here in space? I make a few jokes here and there.”

  “No more chicken jokes, okay? I’ve heard ’em all.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  They laughed, went to the dinette set. Corona ordered coffee from an automatic food butler mounted on the headboard wall. The butler, when activated by a button behind the main panel array, displayed a small plazymer door with a voice activation box to one side and instructions printed on a sign.

  McMurtrey glanced at the black and white weight gauge on the table edge. It showed him a full kilogram heavier than the last reading in his own cabin. He shook his head sadly.

  For a while, McMurtrey sipped coffee and watched Corona. She had an easy grace about her, the way she turned her head and lifted the cup to her mouth. Sometimes she held her head a little askance and looked at him out of the corners of her eyes, as if she were peering at him from a secret, shadowy hiding place.

  Then McMurtrey’s fortunes turned for the worse. A black fly buzzed him, like an ancient warplane reconnoitering for attack. McMurtrey swatted at it, only swished air.

  The fly darted out of his reach, ascended to the ceiling. Before long it dived toward its target with the most irritating buzz-song, forcing McMurtrey to duck.

  “Damn it,” McMurtrey said. “That’s no ordinary fly. It’s a St. Charles Beacher, the most obstinate, accursed species ever bred.”

  He whirled around as he spoke, keeping track of the fly. It grew quiet and landed on the headboard, then crawled perfunctorily onto the screen and down onto a space behind the screen.

  “Stowaway,” McMurtrey rasped, catching Corona’s mirthful expression. “I hate those damned things.”

  Corona finished her coffee, reached around and slid open the door of the food butler, placing the cup inside. In a glimmer of light, the cup disappeared.