"I will tell you," he began again, "what it means to be a New Christian. I will tell you again and again and again-and then you will understand where is God." He took a deep breath and intoned, "We are the children of God. But more than that, we are the particles of God. We are the living breathing pieces through which the quality of God expresses itself on Earth.
"There is no hierarchy of priests and bishops and cardinals and popes standing between you and God. There is you and there is God. You are as connected to God as every other living thing born. on this planet is connected to God.
"Your responsibility-your choice-is whether or not you will acknowledge that relationship, and whether you will live up to your purpose as one of God's most precious tools. This is the message that Christ tried to teach us. This is the message that Rome didn't want to hear. This is the message that the Rome of any age never wants to hear."
Leaning intensely forward once again, he lowered his voice "God is everywhere-if there were a place where God were not in evidence, if there were a place in the universe from which God had withdrawn his holy spirit, that place would bear the shame and the name of hell.
"So where is God? Has he withdrawn from this Earth? No, he has not-but his children have withdrawn from their relationship with God!
"Do you want to know where God is? Look to yourself. Look to your deeds. Look into your own hearts and souls and see how you have failed in your responsibilities. Any place where God does not exist is hell, and if God no longer manifests himself in you, then you are in hell and God is there with you! Yes, God is in hell. God is in Satan's own domain of punishment because we, all of us, have lost our faith in ourselves, our purpose, our planet-our own greatness! And God is in hell!"
Wild Willie, aka Wee Willie, aka Wonderful Willie, aka Weeping Willie, aka Wanton Willie, aka Wild Bill Aycock, pointed out of the screen at me and at every other viewer. "Fall to your knees right now and beg his forgiveness, " he commanded. "God is the ultimate source of all redemption. Stop turning your back on the last hope of humanity. This is your responsibility! Fall to your knees and let the tears flow from your eyes. Beg his forgiveness. Rededicate your life to all that is good and clean and holy and come back to his loving embrace. Redeem yourself and redeem the God that expresses himself through all of us. Now is the time of our last hope." Wild Bill Aycock stepped out from behind the podium and fell to his own knees, the tears already streaming from his eyes. "Join me now in this prayer, in this holy declaration. Let us cast out the mischievous demons of doubt and despair. Let us cast out the libertine urges of our desperate souls. Let us be reborn in a new spirit of holiness. Let us rediscover our strength together. Pray with me now!"
I sat there stunned-at the front of the theater, people I knew, people I recognized, were falling to their knees in front of the swollen, goblin-like, grotesque countenance of the man. Even more terrifying, I wanted to join them. I wanted to believe too. I almost rose from my chair-but I held myself back, so caught up was I in my doubt and disbelief and despair.
"Dear God, this is your humble and obedient servant," Aycock said. "I have sinned. I have lost my faith, and my strength has ,failed me. My flesh has become like water, and my bones are as dust. My eyes no longer see your blessed countenance or your bountiful mercy. I have failed thee, and I am mightily offended at mine own weakness. I would pluck out my own eyes, I would cut off my own arm, I would cast myself out. I hate my sins, and I hate myself for my weakness. I am without hope because I have failed thee.
"Dear Father, I have seen the cost of my sins. I have seen the terrible deadly price that all of us have had to pay-all the dying, all the dreadful deaths and diseases and despair. I have seen my proud cities cast into ruin and my fields blighted with famine. I have seen my children wither and die.
"But all of that is as dust on the wind, my Lord, compared to the terrible wounds that I have inflicted on you. I have betrayed you, my Lord. I have betrayed the covenant that stood between us. My sins are written in your blood, my Lord. I deserve nothing but contempt.
"But, O my Lord, my dear God in hell, I pray to you now, knowing that the fountain of your love is endless, that the wellsprings of your compassion are bountiful and infinite, that you ask only that we come to you with open hearts, so that we may be filled with your love wherever we go and that we may do your work wherever it is wanted and needed.
"Dear Lord-look into my heart and see that my sorrow is sincere. See that my repentance is complete and let me be washed free of hatefulness and vengeance and despair. Please, Lord, I am on my knees before you, begging-please forgive me my failings and let me once more go out into the world with clean hands and a joyful heart.
"Let me renew my efforts on your behalf. Let me be a particle of healing and growth on your planet. Let me do good wherever I walk. Let me sow the seeds of plentiful riches for all who seek them. Dear Lord, renew my soul so that I may do the work of heaven. Let me pick up my staff and go out into your fields again, once more ready to be a part of your great plan and to do my part of your blessed work.
"Dear Lord, please grant me the smallest particle of your infinite strength and wisdom. Renew unto me and all around me the cleansing waters of your infinite love; wash me in its cooling draughts and let me quench my thirst at the fountain of your forgiveness and let me feed my soul at the table of your blessings. Dear Lord, look at my brothers and sisters and see that we are all ready for your renewal now. Let us be one with you again so that we can cast out the monsters that even now besiege us in the holy temple of your Earth. Dear Lord, we join you in the hell that we created. Dear Lord…"
The tears were streaming down his cheeks and mine; but at least Willie knew why he was crying. I was crying in confusion and terror.
Willie didn't know the worst of it. I had looked down into hell and seen what was happening to the rest of God's children. Somehow, I found my way out past all those who were wailing on the floor in front of the screen.
"Hot Seat," April 3rd broadcast: (cont'd)
ROBISON:… Okay, so you think it's working. Well, what about me and Dorothy Chin and all the others? What happens when one of us doesn't want to be in this circle of yours? What are you going to do with us? Kill us? Kick us out? What?
FOREMAN: You're having trouble with this, aren't you, John? You can't separate the idea from the person who speaks it. This isn't a circle of people. It's an environment of ideas, and all people are part of that environment.
ROBISON: Oh, booshwah! You keep saying you want alignment on a larger purpose. Well, we saw how Stalin and Hitler created alignment in their countries. They had to kill anyone who disagreed with them. How far are you prepared to go in search of your alignment? Are you going to build concentration camps to hold all the people who don't align with you? All this gingerbread-language is just another wheelbarrow load of west coast psychobabble, another way for left-wing elitists like you to argue for totalitarianism. You're still talking about shutting down every American's God-given right to disagree-
FOREMAN: (interrupting) Shut up, you blithering idiot. It's my turn to talk now. I'm your guest, not your prisoner! Or didn't they teach manners at that fancy eastern school you got kicked out of? You asked me a question-and I'm going to answer you.
The truth is, you're terribly afraid that somebody is going to treat you as badly as you treat others. That's why you don't dare let anyone disagree with you on your own show. You're practicing the very totalitarianism you claim to despise. If I tried that, you'd call me the worst kind of hypocrite.
FOREMAN: (continuing after commercial)… I'm going to tell you something that disturbs me mightily. I lie awake nights worrying about it. It's old news, but it hasn't lost its power to disturb: "The first casualty when war comes is truth." Hiram Johnson said that to the United States Senate in 1917.
This is not your dilemma alone. It worries all of us, most especially the President. One of the questions she keeps asking is, "How do we unite ourselves to fight this war without g
iving up the most precious things in ourselves and our system of government that we want to preserve?" The question comes up over and over and over again, in almost every late-night brainstorming session at the White House. The President calls us the Colloquium on Applied Philosophy, but we're really just a roomful of old fossils looking at the problem of how a government can wield its authority as justly as possible, particularly in a time of global crisis.
ROBISON: Right. And you still insist that there's no secret group and no secret plan?
FOREMAN: There's no secret group and there's no secret plan. The videolog of every single session is publicly available on the Administration Service Net.
We're not secret and we have no authority. All we do is make recommendations to the President, because she has asked us for our advice.
ROBISON: And what about the rights of the people? Don't we get a voice? What about democracy? What about the right to disagree?
FOREMAN: That's what we're doing here, John. Disagreeing. Our system is based on the premise that the government is accountable to the people. Some people have interpreted that to mean that the people have the right to disagree with the government-but that's an inaccurate way to say it, and ultimately it's an inaccurate way to think about it, because it ennobles disagreement for the sake of disagreement. Disagreement is not in itself inherently virtuous.
ROBISON: Well, how about disagreement in the service of truth?
FOREMAN: That's the justification that's used for all disagreement-that it's in the service of truth. Let me share something with you, we were looking at the whole question of disagreement, and we had one of those insights that transforms the whole discussion. Are you ready for this? We only disagree about what we don't know.
ROBISON: Huh?
FOREMAN: I'll say it again. We only disagree about what we don't know. It's a time bomb. You have to live with it for a while before you fully get it. But it's really very simple: when two parties disagree, whatever the disagreement is about, it indicates that one or the other or both of the parties involved do not have complete information. People don't argue about the color of the sky or if rocks are hard or water is wet. They already know that. People don't argue about what they know. They argue about what they don't know, and what they believe. Belief isn't knowledge. Belief is a conviction without truth behind it. A belief is something you think to be true or want to be true, but you haven't proved it yet. Knowledge doesn't need to be argued. It can be demonstrated. It can be proved. Belief can't be. Do you get the distinction… ?
Gastropedes seem to do most of their hunting in the morning and evening, as this allows them to avoid the heat of midday. In realms close to the equator, however, gastropedes seem to do most of their hunting and eating during the dark, often preferring the bleak hours just before dawn.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 60
Pictures at an Execution
"Be patient. Evolution isn't finished with us yet."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Fifty kilometers south of Japura. The mandala is somewhere over the horizon. The sky glares. The jungle wilts. The blight stretches out to the edge of the world.
Below, a cluster of twenty or thirty worms stare in awe at the great pink sky-whale. They sing to it-a song of futility. Some of the worms have been waiting in our shadow since the moment we anchored. They're beginning to look tired, they're beginning to look weak. Two of them have already collapsed. But more worms are arriving all the time, five or six now, every hour. They join the gathering and add their voices to the growing song. General Tirelli is considering moving the airship to ano,ther location. Again. This will be the third time. A new location every day. But still, the worms keep gathering. Captain Harbaugh has been worried about the increasing rate of helium depletion. Uncle Ira wants us to finish planting the probes and come home. I want
I don't know what I want anymore.
Three days and madness rages on the airship like an infection. Some people wander the corridors, crying. Some just sit where they are and stare into the vacuum in their hearts. Others work obsessively, long hours into the night, hoping to erase the horror, but only coming hard up against it more intensely every moment. Some… have to be sedated.
Three days.
The flyers go out. Most of them come back. The probes are launched. The monitors are planted. The images come back. We stare in horror. And then we send the flyers out again. We launch more probes. We plant more monitors. And then… even more images come back, piling up horror upon horror upon horror.
Pictures of worms like we'd never seen before, humping and shuffling through their nests, up over the thick walls of their corrals. Worms chewing, digging, building. Worms feeding. Worms flashing their displays of emotion at each other-white, red, pink, orange. Strident, thoughtful, playful, angry.
Bunnydogs, little ones like puppies, clumsily stumbling over themselves in their excitement at being alive. Floppy ears, silly faces, wide eyes, eager squeals of delight. Bunnies wrestling-and then, just as abruptly, bunnies fucking in a wild frenzy, libbits, each other; anything that holds still long enough, they hump. Exhausted, they collapse in heaps, one upon another, in blissful sleep. And the worms come and eat them. Their blood flows red.
Bunnymen, naked and grotesque, slithering through the camp. Doing things. Obscure and alien. Carrying things. Bundles of sticks. Foliage. Building piles. Taking them down again. Riding snufflers, guiding them up and down, over and over the same route-channeling their behavior? Training them? Who knows? Everything is a puzzle now. Why does a Martian wear red suspenders? To get to the other side.
Humans. Grotesque and ghastly parodies. This is the animal underneath the pretense of sentience. Hungry, violent, greedy, selfish. Bloated women, even worse than Coari-too big to move. Dark lines. Swirling spiral patterns on their fat rumps, red embroidery on their thighs, tendril ridges curling across their bellies, up their breasts, vine-like traceries on their necks and cheeks. The bunnymen bring them food, and while they eat, the bunnymen climb up their thighs and pump away at their sickened flesh. Bunnymen and fat, glassy-eyed, little girls. Bunnymen and frisky little boys indistinguishable from bunnydogs. The bunnymen are everywhere. The whole camp wallows in a bath of sexual devastation.
Millipedes, traveling in packs, swollen and shiny. They keep to the dark places between the nests, under the foliage, sometimes down in holes, scuttling up and out to feed on the scraps and more often on the bodies.
Pictures of death. Dead children. Babies. Dogs and chickens. Bunnythings. Once, a snuffler. Never a worm.
A fat once-human thing, a woman, baggy and thick and bloated. Inflated. Bulging thighs, like walrus legs, almost immobile; swollen calves, feet like paddles, splayed and shapeless. Huge flabby arms, pendulous breasts, black blotchy nipples, naked, her brown skin glistening with oil and embroidered with intoxicating traceries of horror, viney ridges carved into her skin, as if by something burrowing, a multitude of many hungry little things, eating and crawling, spreading and curling their trails around her immense body in a Halloween nightmare. The flesh crawls of its own volition. The thing moves without a soul, ambling along, shuffling, posture bent like an ape's, spine pulled out of shape by the weight, curved and swayback, using its atrophied arms almost as forelegs. And still, somehow identifiably female. Its eyes are glassy. The face is vague and expressionless, the flesh collapsing under its own weight, sagging off the skull. Her features are melting away, her whole face changing inexorably into a new gravity-drawn configuration, pugnacious and vaguely hostile, ugly, sad, anguished-does she know what's happening to her? Not human anymore, and yet still recognizable, she moves through the camp like an ambulant disease, grazing on the wormberries and iceplant and rednuts. She chews vacantly and contentedly, her expression a strange mirror of the herds in San Francisco and Los Angeles. How has she gotten out of her corral? Worms of all sizes and colors pass her as she trundles along. Some ignore her, some stop to snif
f her curiously, then move on-one stops and sniffs, then flows over her in one swift movement. The blood flows profusely. The worm gulps and jerks, gulps and jerks, pulling her flesh down into its throat. The expression on the woman's face is slack. Drugged? Her eyes are wide with puzzlement, not pain, as she disappears down the monster's engorged gullet. It rests there on the blood-blackened earth, jerking spasmodically while the meal works its way backward.
Is this the way the world ends? Not with a bang, but a belch? I keep waiting for it to happen-for the moment when the monstrousness of the horrors loses its power to stagger me. I keep waiting for the numbness. Instead, I just get more horror. There is no end to it. I am alone in hell. Just me and God and the worms. There is no end.
I don't know who I am anymore.
Just as the worms are transforming-so am I. But into what?
If I knew, then the transformation would have already occurred, wouldn't it?
We cluster in the observation bay, scientists, technicians, aides, members of the airship crew, anyone with time on their hands. We stand around the railings and stare down at the somehow now pitiful animals. Their stripes flicker in bizarre reflections of the airship above. The poor things-they're enslaved to their biology. But I can't help thinking that we are just as enslaved to ours. We poor monkeys.
Monkeys and worms. Worms and monkeys. Locked in a death-struggle that neither side understands.
Another thought floats to the surface. There is no such thing as one monkey.
And what does that mean, I wonder?
Feral gastropedes should be considered insane and cannot be depended on to demonstrate the behavior of socialized individuals. Individual animals that do not demonstrate torpidity during the heat of the day or that do not do their hunting and eating at night should be treated with great caution as they are, in all probability, feral specimens.
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