by Gene Wolfe
“I feel it’s my duty to stay; but it’s my duty to go, as well. I wish my duties might be reconciled.”
“I shall emerge very soon, Father.”
The priest nodded, realized he was still holding the knife, and let his hands fall. “So you tell me night after night. I don’t believe you.”
Amused again the Seraph asked, “Then why are you eager to kill me?”
“I’m not eager to kill you. I want …”
“Yes?”
“To sleep. To sleep as other men do. To find peace, and rest, in sleep.” The priest raised the knife again, but his fingers were weak, so weak it nearly slipped away.
“Is that all?”
“To pray. To say mass here. Not to—To wait here, at this mission, as I was intended to wait by your race and mine, for a living Seraph.”
The Seraph’s voice was a caress, and a blessing. “Not to betray us as your people betrayed us.”
“Yes!”
“Come closer. You could not strike me from where you stand even if you wished to strike. Come closer.”
Lowering the knife once more, the priest shook his head.
“Do you know why we became Christians, Father?”
The priest sighed. “By the grace of God.”
“True, though you do not truly believe as yet. His grace makes use of means, of tools. Why?”
“Because you thought we’d spare you then.” Father Joseph gazed at the knife in his hands; it seemed as inexplicable as any Seraph artifact. Was one to grasp both ends? “You thought we had decency enough for that, and you were wrong.”
“Because we wanted to understand you, we became like you. You took lands that were never ours, and called them ours, and killed us lest we ask for them back. Now we are dead, but we shall rise again, in Christ.”
The knife clattered to the stone floor.
“Like the flower from its seed, the moth from its cocoon. We become, come into being. If you were more like Christ, you would understand us better.”
Fear struck Brook like a lash. With all his strength, he heaved back on the stick; the roller’s big, soft wheels stopped … spun in reverse. For an instant it seemed he and it would surely go over. Instead they raced wildly backward, no longer following any stair, lost on the naked slope and out of control.
He pushed the stick forward to stop. The roller halted, canted at such an angle that he knew he would fall if he tried to dismount—fall and tumble, and at last drop.
Cold perspiration streamed from his forehead into his eyes. He wiped it away and eased the lever forward, edging the roller back in the direction of the stair. It was wrong, that stair, of course. The wrong one, though he had been so confident.
He stopped the roller again and dismounted. A hundred steps returned him to the precipice; golden light from his palm revealed a smashed roller far below—one certainly, and possibly two; he counted five wheels. Broken bones, bleached by Mirzam’s young and pitiless sun, lay among the wreckage. A lonely wind sobbed between him and them, gritty with sand.
Some men would pray now, Brook thought. Some would spit. Why am I caught between them?
Slowly he made his way back to the roller and crept back to the landing. After lengthy deliberation he chose another of its diverging stairs and inched up it at a walking pace.
It took an hour to reach the top; once there, he parked the roller on a blanket-sized patch of nearly level ground and rooted through the cargo compartment for his sohner. With it, he circled the entire mission, scrambling wearily over insecure stones and hearing only the dull buzz of solid rock. The crypt was inside, clearly, under the baffling inlay of the floor; he had missed it, in spite of all his sweeping and careful peering.
Maybe they should’ve sent someone else, he thought; perhaps I’m not the right person after all. Aching with fatigue, he pulled open one of the massive doors, reflecting that it was he who had been sent in any case—the one who would have to do whatever was done, because there was no one else present to do anything.
Sohner in hand, he shuffled back and forth across the nave, hearing only stone, solid and dull, until he had almost reached the chancel. There (at last) there came the sharp ping of a cavity. Scarlet numerals rolled across the sohner’s small screen: three hundred and forty-nine cubic meters. Brook nodded to himself, pulled off the earphone, and switched off the sohner. Here was the crypt, but where was its entrance? He puzzled over that for twenty minutes or more, poking here and prying there, and even considered waking the priest, before he realized that the priest had already told him.
“Roll aside the stone.”
He had thought the priest dreaming, and doubtless had been correct. Yet that phrase surely contained the answer he sought; the priest, hearing his voice, had dreamt of exhibiting the crypt, as he planned to do in the morning.
The altar appeared far too heavy for one man to move, but he carried the translucent chalice and its small cloth into the sacristy, folded the clean white altar cloth carefully and laid it beside them, set his shoulder to the altar, and heaved with all his strength.
It trundled to one side so easily that he nearly fell into the opening beneath it, rolling onto one rough, rounded end to reveal a lightless opening through which even a large man (or a large coffin, Brook reflected) might easily pass.
For a moment he hung back, his left foot on the first step. Surely there had been some sound from below? Loudly, echoing, shocking, came the clang of metal on stone; it was followed by the murmur of the priest’s voice.
As silently as he could manage, Brook moved the altar back into place, then spread the altar cloth once more and added the chalice with its pall. Wearily, he left the mission by the rear door and mounted the long, straight stair to the rectory. The priest slept as before upon the improvised pallet in the study, both arms stretched above his head now. Brook stared at him, snorted, and went up to bed.
It was indeed a different world.
“There were never more than two million or so,” the priest said, “and they didn’t need a great deal of food. Much of their lives was spent in dormancy. Much of ours is, too, although it doesn’t seem to do us a great deal of good. Perhaps if we cared more for the worlds that we call ours, we’d discover that we too could get along on less food. And if we cared more for God … .” He shrugged, turning away from the brazen sarcophagus to study glyphs incised in the walls of the crypt.
“There would be fewer children to feed,” Brook finished for him, “and better food and care for those we had. You’re right, of course.” He bent above the desiccated Seraph. “They changed like insects? Egg, larva, chrysalis, and adult?”
The priest shrugged. “No one really knows how many changes there were, or what the adult form actually was. In some cases, their transformations seem to have been self-directed.”
“The flying, sexual stage would have been the last.” Brook prodded the Seraph’s open jaw; only by directing his palmpilot between the wasted lips could he make out the remains of what had once been a tongue (or something like one) inside the open mouth. “This individual isn’t winged.”
As though he had not been listening, the priest said, “I’ve wondered at times whether they hadn’t visited the Motherworld.”
Brook straightened up. “Because pictures of winged spirits go back to Sumer? They didn’t call themselves Seraphs, did they?”
“Because of what you said a moment ago. And because others have said it so often—that word larva. It’s Latin. Do you know what it means?”
Brook shook his head. “The Romans are supposed to be in my balliwick, but I’ve never learned the language, except for a few names. Try me on Ugaritic or Moabite. Let’s see. The larva’s what hatches from an egg, so I suppose it means a child—something like that.”
“It means ghost,” the priest said.
“I’m afraid I don’t follow you.” Brook tossed up a light; it touched the ceiling of the crypt and stuck there.
“I’m not sure I follow myself
. Can’t I help you with that? I’m perfectly willing to, if you’ll tell me what you want me to do.”
Brook shook his head. “I know what I need, and it’ll only take a minute.”
“Are you going to dissect?”
The archeologist glanced around sharply; there had been a change in tone. “No. I assume you don’t want me to? Not now, and if you mean me, Tony Brook personally, not ever. This will be a job for a comparative anatomist, and a good one.” He toyed with another light. “You don’t really want that ride to Treaty, do you. You’d rather stay here.”
The priest shrugged again. “What I want is scarcely the issue.”
“Exactly. Do you recall what that superior of yours said? Monsignor whats-his-name? He said that you were to remain here as long as you could be of service to me. All right, I want you to stay right here and protect this body—this whole place, but our late friend particularly—until I talk one of your universities into sending someone out. It may take a while, I warn you.”
The priest opened his mouth, and shut it again.
“I’m perfectly serious, and I’m going to put it in writing. Once you’re gone, there won’t be anything to keep any idiot who can borrow a roller from driving up here, taking this body, and burning it or tearing it to bits. I could tell you things that happened in Egypt—For a thousand years specialists will weep over this squandered opportunity to learn about a race that was in many ways, and maybe in every way, superior to our own. Stay here, Father—I mean it. He put you under my orders, didn’t he? Very well, I’m ordering you to stay.”
“It’s extremely tempting,” the priest said slowly.
“It’s not a matter of temptation, Father. It’s your duty.”
“But, no. That isn’t what Monsignor Nealy intended, and we both know it. No, I don’t believe I can.”
Brook made a final effort. “I’m going to spend the rest of the day on this, and a couple of things up there that I skimped yesterday; I’ll leave in the morning. I want you to promise me, Father, that you’ll think about what I said tonight—about your true God-given duty, as opposed to doing whatever you find least pleasant. I don’t believe God’s quite as cruel as you imagine.”
The priest nodded and started up the steps to the chancel. “If you don’t mind,” he said mildly, “I always think best in the open air.”
It was more difficult to drive the roller down the tangled stairs than it had been to go up them, something Brook had not anticipated; the priest’s weight, and that of his luggage, added to Brook’s two hundred kilos of clothing and equipment made it necessary to ride the brake constantly, even with the arrester on Full Regenerative.
“That way,” the priest said. He pointed, one black-sleeved arm over Brook’s broad shoulder. “This is one of the two places in which you can get lost—lost seriously—going down.”
Brook nodded, steering to the right. “I didn’t think there were any. Where’s the other?”
“At the bottom.” If the priest was joking, there was no hint of it in his voice.
Brook stopped there. “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I want to take one last shot, Father. I neglected to get this before I went up.”
“Of course not. I’d like to remain here for a few minutes myself. I’ll probably never come back.”
The labyrinthine stone stairs gleamed like new-minted gold in Brook’s holoscreen, flawlessly lit by the morning sunshine. At the top, the graceful Seraphic mission church seemed a pretty toy. Such a toy, Brook thought idly, as real angels might have built for the Christ child’s crib set. Except—
He turned to the priest. “There’s somebody up there. A man in black.”
The priest nodded and smiled.
“But you were alone,” Brook said, “that’s what you told me.”
“We didn’t want to frighten you.” The priest waved back to the tiny figure at the summit of the twining stairs. “Nor would you have believed us, and so that seemed best. But see how nicely things have worked out, Dr. Brook! Monsignor’s instructions have been followed in both senses. I am coming in obedience to him; my brother remains to protect our mission, as you wished.”
“Is he disfigured or something?”
“All of us are deformed in some degree by evil, Dr. Brook. That is its chief result. My brother is less hideous than most.”
Brook took a deep breath. “Well, that explains a lot.”
The priest did not reply.
His final holostat, taken as Brook repacked his equipment; and they started off in earnest. Fast though he drove, roaring up blind dunes constructed by the laboring winds, climbing mountains of sand not greatly inferior to the Jebel Seir while trailing a plume of sallow dust more lofty still, Mirzam’s long day was three-quarters spent before the ocher and orange desert that dashed by their racing roller softened at last to green.
As they drew near Treaty, Brook spoke for the first time in hours. “I’m going to put up at Chesterton House, Father. It’s reasonable and comfortable. I want you to let me pay for a room there for you, too. I stayed with you for two nights, after all.”
“If you wish,” the priest said. And then, “It’s very kind of you.”
A cheerful auburn-haired attendant supervised the robots that unloaded their baggage. “Been out in the desert long?”
“I haven’t,” Brook told her, “but Father Krska was there for more than ten years.”
She smiled at the priest; and he nodded to her, affirming the truth of what Brook had said.
So this is unlawful desire, he thought, as his eyes traced the tender curve of her lips. This is the sensation they feel, the thing they fight against and rush to: this twitching in the shoulder blades.
I had not known.
Lord of the Land
The Nebraskan smiled warmly, leaned forward, and made a sweeping gesture with his right hand, saying, “Yes indeed, that’s exactly the sort of thing I’m most interested in. Tell me about it, Mr. Thacker, please.”
All this was intended to keep old Hop Thacker’s attention away from the Nebraskan’s left hand, which had slipped into his left jacket pocket to turn on the miniature recorder there. Its microphone was pinned to the back of the Nebraskan’s lapel, the fine brown wire almost invisible.
Perhaps old Hop would not have cared in any case; old Hop was hardly the shy type. “Waul,” he began, “this was years an’ years back, the way I hear’d it. Guess it’d have been in my great-granpaw’s time, Mr. Cooper, or mebbe before.”
The Nebraskan nodded encouragingly.
“There’s these three boys, an’ they had a old mule, wasn’t good fer nothin’ ‘cept crowbait. One was Colonel Lightfoot—course didn’t nobody call him colonel then. One was Creech an’ t’ther’un …” The old man paused, fingering his scant beard. “Guess I don’t rightly know. I did know. It’ll come to me when don’t nobody want to hear it. He’s the one had the mule.”
The Nebraskan nodded again. “Three young men, you say, Mr. Thacker?”
“That’s right, an’ Colonel Lightfoot, he had him a new gun. An’ this other’un—he was a friend of my granpaw’s or somebody—he had him one everybody said was jest about the best shooter in the county. So this here Laban Creech, he said he wasn’t no bad shot hisself, an’ he went an’ fetched his’n. He was the’un had that mule. I recollect now.
“So they led the ol’ mule out into the medder, mebby fifty straddles from the brake. You know how you do. Creech, he shot it smack in the ear, an’ it jest laid down an’ died, it was old, an’ sick, too, didn’t kick or nothin’. So Colonel Lightfoot, he fetched out his knife an’ cut it up the belly, an’ they went on back to the brake fer to wait out the crows.”
“I see,” the Nebraskan said.
“One’d shoot, an’ then another, an’ they’d keep score. An’ it got to be near to dark, you know, an’ Colonel Lightfoot with his new gun an’ this other ma’ that had the good’un, they was even up, an’ this Laban Creech was only one behind ‘em. Reckon
there was near to a hundred crows back behind in the gully. You can’t jest shoot a crow an’ leave him, you know, an’’spect the rest to come. They look an’ see that dead’un, an’ they say, Waul, jest look what become of him. I don’t calc’late to come anywheres near there.”
The Nebraskan smiled. “Wise birds.”
“Oh, there’s all kinds of stories ‘bout’em,” the old man said. “Thankee, Sarah.”
His granddaughter had brought two tall glasses of lemonade; she paused in the doorway to dry her hands on her red-and-white checkered apron, glancing at the Nebraskan with shy alarm before retreating into the house.
“Didn’t have a lick, back then.” The old man poked an ice cube with one bony, somewhat soiled finger. “Didn’t have none when I was a little ‘un, neither, till the TVA come. Nowadays you talk’bout the TVA an’ they think you mean them programs, you know.” He waved his glass. “I watch’em sometimes.”
“Television,” the Nebraskan supplied.
“That’s it. Like, you take when Bud Bloodhat went to his reward, Mr. Cooper. Hot? You never seen the like. The birds all had their mouths open, wouldn’t fly fer anything. Lost two hogs, I recollect, that same day. My paw, he wanted to save the meat, but’twasn’t a bit of good. He says he thought them hogs was rotten’fore ever they dropped, an’ he was’fraid to give it to the dogs, it was that hot. They was all a-sleepin’ under the porch anyhow. Wouldn’t come out fer nothin’.”
The Nebraskan was tempted to reintroduce the subject of the crow shoot, but an instinct born of thousands of hours of such listening prompted him to nod and smile instead.
“Waul, they knowed they had to git him under quick, didn’t they? So they got him fixed, cleaned up an’ his best clothes on an’ all like that, an’ they was all in there listenin’, but it was terrible hot in there an’ you could smell him pretty strong, so by an’ by I jest snuck out. Wasn’t nobody payin’ attention to me, do you see? The women’s all bawlin’ an’ carryin’ on, an’ the men thinkin’ it was time to put him under an’ have another.”
