by Steve M.
Problem was that while Allor would appear like a god and then open his cloak to let everyone marvel at his good fortune, members of the priesthood had taken to doing the same thing. Except without cloaking capabilities or Allor’s good fortune. They would enter rooms pretending not to be seen then fling open their robes with a dramatic gesture which on Allor worked exceedingly well. But when they did it, it looked exceedingly ridiculous.
“How did the latest test go?” asked Canto.
“As planned. The Apostle took out the entire island,” replied Allor.
There is only one continent on Earth 7. But there are thousands of islands offshore. And there is a large cluster far away that only the most capable or the most desperate boats can reach. Allor tested the weapon they call The Apostle on one of the deserted island yesterev. Everything on the island was destroyed.
“But what if Duvi isn’t in the temple when you get there?” Pens asked.
“Then I will wait,” said Allor.
“But we may have started while you are still waiting,” replied Demos.
“True. But please continue without me. Just do not make any motion towards Pyramos until you see that it is destroyed. Remember, nobody crosses the Drim River until after the flash.”
“Understood, my lord,” replied Demos.
“I will wait fifty tox then detonate The Apostle. I would prefer to look Duvi in the eye right before he dies. However, I will forgo my pleasure for the sake of controlling the chaos. I can get to healing the survivors sooner this way. Rao would want that.”
“And what if Duvi offers to surrender?” asked Demos.
“He will cook anyway,” replied Tal with her usual forceful tone.
“But what if we were him?” asked Demos.
“Then we would deserve to die for our crimes,” replied Tal emphatically. “Can you imagine what it is like to be a slave to the Ceros? I’d rather die.”
Demos nodded his head. His wife had disappeared years ago after a Ceros raid. No sign of a struggle. Demos believed his much-loved Obo was frozen in her terror and taken without force. He will forever regret their argument in the hours before the raiders came over the hills. Eventually he was able to drive the Ceros away with a broken mirror…but you already know that part.
“When do we go?” asked Demos.
“No one knows until the time,” replied Allor. “Keeps you safe from harm.”
“Or a victim of torture and murder by someone demanding to know from us things that we really don’t know. There is that possibility also,” replied Canto with an exaggerated frown.
“Someone is a cloudy day today,” replied Tal harshly. “Keep your suit turned on low. And use cloaking when you are out among His Own. They don’t need to know we are there.”
It was later in the evening when Allor was out among the crowd in the Valley of Trade, the noisy, raucous market, far from the priests. The air was hot and black with thick smoke from the lanterns rising towards the stars. He watched the man on the stairs. The ragged and dusty man stood near the top of steps.
“There is none. Never has been. That’s right. I come to give you my message. And my message is that all gods are false. All gods are human-made creations and reflect our willingness to believe fantastical stories rather than be uncomfortable in not knowing.”
Allor looked at the tall man with the long dark hair now streaked with gray. Allor had been coming to listen to this man since he began in the valley eighty-two revs ago, when it was much colder.
“And for an answer that makes you sleep well at night, what do they want? Complete and utter submission. Oh, and money. Let’s not forget that. Money, always lots of money. When was the last time you saw a priest go hungry? They don’t. Because they take your money. And in return they tell you fantastical stories and make up rules for you to follow. And don’t misunderstand me, there must be some rules. But the rules we need are the ones that we can all figure out for ourselves. Don’t hurt anyone, don’t lie, don’t murder. Those are easy. But what we don’t need is a rule insisting that we get on our knees to pray twice a day to some guy who says he is a god.”
“But if he isn’t a god, then who is?” yelled a man from the crowd below.
“No one. That’s my point,” yelled the atheist prophet.
“Then where do we come from?” the man yelled back.
“From the stars. We were brought here many kilorevs ago from another Earth,” came the reply.
“So the people who brought us here, they are our gods,” the man yelled back with a triumphant tone.
“No. Again, you’re missing the point.”
Being a religious prophet, the kind that preached in the public squares far away from the temples, had been a time-honored profession on Earth 7 for as long as anyone could remember. But it always maintained that element of demented entertainment more than anything remotely resembling truth or facts. Those two spiritual anomalies were sparsely used and then only in a manner to add credibility to the most outrageous bullshit. It was that old Ecclesiastical classic: Use Truth A as a character witness to Absurd Bullshit B. It goes like this. Since I proved A is true, then you must believe me that B is true also. But don’t look too closely. That’s how it is supposed to work. Finally I claim Absurd Bullshit B to be a rabbit, Truth A to be a hat, and charge everyone money for lying to them.
And here in the Valley of Trade was a religious prophet that was telling the truth but having a hard time getting someone to agree, much less pay him for his opinions. And when the lamps got low in the night a man would come along and offer the atheist prophet a place to sleep for the night. And a meal. Allor always made sure of that.
Even with age, Allor’s father was still a handsome man.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Personal Protection Suits (PPS) are self-cleaning. This was fortunate for Koven because he had not been in a Personal Transport Device (PTD) in a few weeks and it was like a sailor going back onto a boat after a long time. However, his shoes were not self-cleaning, and he wiped the toe of his right shoe on the leaves of a branch of a large shrub as they walked towards the site of communication from just a few tox earlier. As they came over the hill, they were surprised to find a large crowd in a small valley.
And down in the middle of the large crowd, at the lowest point of the valley, was a man with a long black cape. A man that was also wearing a PPS. The crowd was pressed in right around him. Koven looked at the man then looked at Rusa.
“Is that a remedium he’s using?” Koven asked as he watched the man run the small device over a young child’s head.
“Yes. It’s an older model, but definitely a remedium. The model he is using is approximately eight point fifteen kilorevs old. That is why it is so slow,” Rusa replied.
“And he’s got on a PPS,” replied Koven. He reached to the control on his chest and pulled his PPS off quickly. The strange-looking metal that made the PPS danced at the end of the insignia. He could see it, but no one else could.
“Yes. I noticed that,” replied Rusa, invisible also and standing beside him.
And honing in on the sound of her voice, Koven swung his PPS over at Rusa. The moment it touched her, it wrapped itself around her instantly.
“Gotcha,” said Koven, and for just a moment he could see the fine curves of Rusa’s body as the PPS adjusted itself to fit her before becoming invisible like her.
“Very swift maneuver,” said Rusa. “However, I would like to point out that putting a PPS on me is redundant, as I am impervious to all things protected by a PPS, as well as wine, chocolate, and blackberry stains.”
Koven pulled his PPS off her and felt the nice warm tingle when it wrapped around certain parts of his body again.
“Excuse me,” said a woman that bumped into Koven. She turned to see no one was there. Then she swung her arm like a sword. Koven quietly jumped out of the way. When her arm only gathered air, she gave up and walked away shaking her head.
/> “Let’s move over near those trees,” said Rusa.
Invisibility has a side effect on teams of agents. It is important to know where your team members are at all times. There are two ways this is done. All agents have a broadcast chip under their skin, and this can be used with the heads-up display to see the location of the tiny blue blip in the field of vision. But there’s a problem. Shifting focus back and forth in depth between the tiny blue blips and the rest of the world causes nausea. For this reason many agents forgo this and simply hold hands while they move around.
Koven grabbed Rusa’s hand. They moved past the people. It was Koven’s first time on a quarantine planet.
Koven came from a world where the remedium was used daily. He had never seen a blind person before. He didn’t even know that they could exist. Or those that walked with limps or had disfiguring scars. He was shocked when he saw the small man crawling along the ground like a snake, his two withered and shrunken useless legs pulled behind him by his two muscular arms.
Rusa contained the assimilation of all human knowledge, updated every twenty minutes. The condition of humans on Earth 7 did not bother her.
They saw the incoming gold glow of a PTD. A moment later they watched a woman exit her bubble beside Allor. She too carried a remedium and began to heal others in the crowd. Koven noted she was wearing a PPS also and they both wore comms bracelets. Koven thought she was very pretty.
They watched the man and woman heal others. And after they healed each of them, a tall woman would approach them. She gave them a blue medallion to wear around their necks. The woman wore a PPS, comms bracelet on her wrist, and had a PTD strapped to her waist. The woman spoke at length with a few of the people in the crowd. The people she spoke with were those that nodded in agreement often and were much more enthusiastic than the rest.
A man pulled a woman through the crowd. Koven and Rusa were far away, but even at a distance they could hear him. Rusa could have heard him at one hundred times the distance.
“Stop fighting me, woman. You are possessed of devils and this man will heal you,” he yelled at her.
“The only devil that possesses me is you,” said the woman with a hateful tone as she pulled against the chains she had wrapped around her waist.
“Don’t you disrespect me. You are less than the shit from my ass,” he said, and then slapped her. It was not a gentle slap, it was the hard kind meant to bring a person to heel, like a dog.
“I hate you,” she yelled at him, and struggled even harder against his powerful frame pulling her towards the healers.
The man pulled his fist back to punch the woman. He never landed the blow. His head fell from his shoulders a moment before his lifeless body fell to the ground. Behind him stood the tall woman.
“I will kill any man that puts a woman in chains,” said the striking woman with the sword in her hand. A gasp made its way through the crowd, then a murmur started.
“Know this,” yelled the woman. “I am Tal, Mother of Allor. I am the mother of the man that heals you. I am the mother of God.”
“Mother of God,” a woman near Koven and Rusa repeated.
It took Allor and Canto nearly two hundred tox to cure all of the people in the valley. When they were done, they talked to some of those left remaining. Koven and Rusa got closer to listen. It was a speech about helping others. When the man with the long black hair was finished speaking, he and the two women left via PTDs. Their golden bubbles had left barely a few tix before Rusa had calculated that the trajectory would take them back to the main Temple of Allor.
First Rusa left for the temple, her cloaking still hiding her so that only a large pretty golden bubble was visible. After checking his PTD and weapons and cloaking, Koven departed for the temple also.
They stood invisible in front of the two guards set to protect the entrance to the temple. Then they walked past them unseen. It was a vast space inside, with much more height than required for a species that rarely grew above two maatars in height. The ceiling was very tall, nearly forty maatars from the floor. And at the front of the huge hall at the back was a large wooden altar. And behind the altar was an area hidden behind curtains. And on those curtains that flowed down from the forty-maatar-tall ceiling was the letter A inside of a circle. It was on both curtains, and each letter was at least ten maatars tall. It was so large that no matter who you were or where you were from, you were certain of one thing: the owner of the place had a name that started with A. You could further deduce that it was a high probability that they would insist on proper capitalization. There were a few people praying, but there was no service going on.
Koven and Rusa walked down the far side of the nave of the temple, then past the altar and behind the curtains. They faced a dark gray wall made from stone from a local quarry. It was highly polished as if it had a glass cover. They moved along the wall to a door at the northwest corner of the room. The door opened into a hallway with its own collection of doors along it. They moved towards the first door. They could hear the sound of water splashing and voices, a man and a woman’s voice. Even with cloaking, they couldn’t cloak the opening or closing of a door. So they waited for a few minutes to listen carefully to the sounds. The voices were playful and the couple laughed often.
Eventually Koven opened the door to the room, just enough for them to squeeze through it. Once inside they were faced with walls covered in the deepest red fabric and furniture of dark hardwoods. Past the large bed and a sunken part of the floor covered in highly ornate pillows was a large square pool filled with water. In the water was Tal. Also in the water with her was a young man, much younger than her. A handsome young man near to her son’s age. They were in each other’s arms and he was kissing Tal’s face over and over quickly. Near the bed was a wooden bench. On it sat the comms bracelet, the remedium, and the personal transport Device. On the bed lay the personal protection suit.
Koven was getting excited by watching them in the pool. He whispered to Rusa that they should go.
“Did you see any new tech?” he asked her.
“No. Same as she had before. Need to keep looking,” Rusa replied.
Koven led them down to the next door. The room was empty, no furniture at all. It had a pool like the other room. But there were no pillows, and the bed was just a bare stone platform with nothing on it. In the middle of the sunken space without pillows was a large red stain on the floor. Blood stains are unmistakable.
The next three rooms were not devoid of furnishings but were devoid of people. There was evidence that people stayed in the rooms. Personal items like jewelry, hair ribbons, and boots were to be found in them. They even found a remedium device, although they were unsure if it was in addition to the two they already saw earlier.
But near the far end of the hall they could hear a voice. It was loud and had a strong, forceful tone that tried hard to mask a tendency to sound whiny. It was Pens. The door to his room was partially open, and Koven and Rusa moved into the room carefully. It was sparse but had evidence of use. There were robes hanging from a piece of wood coming directly out from the stone wall.
In the sunken part of the floor, where in most other rooms there were ornate pillows covering the floor, there were none. In place of the pillows and cushions were mirrors, tall mirrors in wooden frames. There were twelve of them and they stood arranged, like the hours on a clock in a circle. And in the center, between the mirrors, stood Pens, the High Priest of the Cult of Allor. His arm was raised above his head like a dramatic actor delivering melodramatic lines.
“I know you are scared right now. You’ve been living in fear your entire life. Fear of the religious wars. Fear of your own religious police. Every one of you are like every one of us, we all know victims to our mutual hatred. We all have that hole inside us, the one left by the death of a loved one. But from today, this will cease. From today, the fighting between religions is ended. From today, there is only the Cult of Allor, the living God,
the healer, the God that walks among us, making us better. Allor the loving God that heals throughout the land, the rich and the poor alike.
“And when you hurt, Allor feels that hurt. When others wrong you, Allor feels your anger, your pain, your shame. And Allor is a powerful and merciful god. He is merciful to the meek, to the weak, to the humble. But beware his wrath. When you hurt and wish for revenge, Allor is that wish fulfilled.”
Pens looked at himself from all of the mirrors. He adjusted his posture, becoming more erect.
“Allor brings you a spiritual revolution, a better way of living, with less rules and more freedom. Allor brings you good health. Allor reduces your tithing by half. You are entering a golden age.”
“No. No. No,” he said loudly to no one that was there.
“You are entering a golden age. Yeah, that’s it, lead with the golden age. Get them dreaming, then reinforce the dream with the lower taxes, universal healthcare, more leisure time, and more freedom. Much better in that order,” he continued in his critical monologue.
“We? Or You? We, definitely. More inclusive.”
“We are entering a golden age. An age of more. We’re cutting your tithing by half. Yes, it’s true. And the healer will continue to heal you at no cost to you. That’s right, no cost to you. And did I mention you only have to pray twice a day now? No more three times a day. No need to stop your productive day to pray. Allor knows you love him. He is not an insecure god like others. And you are free. Free from the dietary rules, free from the rule of dress, free from the double step routines when entering the temple. Free from the long-winded handshakes with secret messages. And no more damned religious police with their sticks going around beating us for not being this, not doing that, not, not, not.”
