The Book of Feasts & Seasons

by John C. Wright

  “I thought you had seen enough Star Trek to understand. Light travels at a certain given speed. Eta Aquilae is fourteen hundred light years away, and the light was–”

  “You said that before,” said Tyler.

  “Well,” said the priest, spreading his hands. “Eta Aquilae was the Star of Bethlehem.”

  “What? I mean, what does that have to do with it, sir?”

  “Their world was destroyed for us. That is why they have come.”

  Tyler shook his head. “Father I am missing something. If their star blew up, the light would go equally in all directions, so why did they pick our star to head toward, and our planet?

  “Why come to Southern Maryland? Can't beat the crab fishing,” offered Hynkel.

  “They had instruments that detected an energy manifestation on Earth, the kind of energy we would call spiritual or psychic but which they, with their ideal machine, can measure and understand. The energy intersection registered as greater than the sum total of the mass energy of the universe, so they knew a being more real than our reality had compressed himself, the word is kenosis, into our three-dimensional continuum. Like a whale climbing into a mousehole. The shockwave of that spread across this arm of the Galaxy, and the Designers instructed a ship of the Accouchers to come here. Accoucher is what he called his race or order of being, at least when he talked to me. I think it sounds more dignified than Bezeks or Bezekians or Bezekishmen.”

  Hynkel said, “You keep calling them men. I thought they were eggs and starfish, Padre?”

  “Jellyfish. Of course they are men. Otherwise I could not have performed a baptism. They clearly are rational creatures, and rationality is the image of God, and they clearly are creatures able to make moral choices, to choose between good and evil. Conscience is the image of God and also His still, soft voice. You should have learned this in school when you were young.”

  Hynkel said, “They don't teach that stuff any more in school.”

  “You mean they don't teach theology?”

  Hynkel said, “No, I mean they don't teach jack. You mostly learn self-esteem and loving yourself, and no talking back, and pledging allegiance to the picture of the Head of State, then more loving yourself, then respect for blacks and backdoor reamers–”

  Tyler said, “Quiet, Andy! You don't talk to a priest about things like that!”

  The Father nodded, but his words contradicted Tyler. “I hear confessions, so I hear much worse than a young man your age could imagine. I hear many sins, over and over and over. It is not as if someone can invent a new one, they merely give the old ones new names. Like self esteem for pride, or self-expression for sodomy. That is one of the things he talked about with me, when he told us the fate of the Earth.” His eyes must have been sharper than they seemed, for he said. “Ah! The secret police are approaching. I'm surprised that the government reacted so quickly.”

  “We don't have secret police in America,” said Hynkel.

  The old priest smiled. “Well, if you knew about them, they would not be a secret, I suppose. But before the police come here to kill me, which one of you would like to rule the world? Here is the machine.”

  The Father opened his palm, and a little spark of light like a star, shinning, clear, cold and brilliant, hovered above his hand. It looked neither like a firefly nor a candleflame nor anything from Earth. Despite that it was tiny, Tyler had the sudden, dizzying sensation he was looking at something immense, very far away.

  “No one is coming to kill you, Father,” Hynkel said.

  The old man smiled. “Perhaps not at first. But I doubt I will withstand the enhanced interrogation. In my father's time, those were only used on foreign terrorists.

  Hynkel said, “Come on, Father. This is the most free country in the world! The secret police, if they even do exist, are just there to guard our freedoms. But no one is going to torture you to death. That's crazy talk!”

  Tyler said to Hynkel, “Didn't you just say there were no secret police?”

  Hynkel shrugged. “I meant, not that loyal citizens need to worry about. There are a lot of reactionaries and Hateniks around. Veterans, NRA members, fundies, antigovernment types, you know.”

  The old priest smiled sadly, and he tossed the little spark of light floating above his palm up into the air. It rose and fell, and he caught it, and the chapel went dark when he closed his fingers about it. “My uncle, may he rest in peace, was something of an expert genealogist. My father's side is from France, of course, with a name like Rossignol. It means nightingale, did you know that? My mother's side of the family is descended from the Hartfords and the Calverts, and if the British still ruled in this area, my grandfather would have been in line to be Lord Baltimore. An interesting little tidbit of history, you know, is that the man who would have been the 7th Baron Baltimore, Henry Hartford, still has heirs claiming to own land in DC and Maryland. One of the cases went all the way to the Supreme Court. We were very poor when I was young—;are you young men even old enough to remember what the green paper looked like, before the money system collapsed?—I always daydreamed, when I was a child you know, what it would be like to become Emperor of the World and King of the North Pole or something, and press the old ancestral claim. Most of the Eastern Shore would be my personal estates.”

  The old man's voice was drifting and dreamy, and his eyes were blinking at the ceiling when he opened his hand again, flooding the chapel with eerie light, and tossed and caught the spark again.

  “But my uncle told me that the Rossignols also are descended from the DeValois dynasty in France, and they make a claim that goes all the way back to the Merovingian Kings of the Franks. Which is odd because the Harfords of England also trace a lineage through their ancestors who came to England with William the Conqueror back to the Merovingians.

  “And there are those to this day that claim Clovis was descended from Mary Magdalene, who was married in secret to Our Savior. Blasphemy, of course, but, if it is true than the blood of the Virgin runs in my veins. And I was just thinking about all those lands that should by right belong to Lord Baltimore.”

  The old man drew his eyes down. “But the Piscataway, they have an older claim than Lord Baltimore to this land, and they displaced the tribes who were here before them. Do you see the images in the windows?

  “The Normans displaced the Saxons who displaced the Romans living in England, and they displaced whatever rude tribes had been there before them, and they displaced the Picts, and they displaced the Neanderthal for all I know. And this is Maryland, perhaps the most peaceful part of the globe.

  “Every other scrap of land on the face of this sad, tired Earth has changed hands on average once or twice a generation, with shed tears and shed blood enough to water the soil like it was an altar of Moloch.

  “If I have all those men in my background, emperors and conquerors, I know what they would do once absolute power came into their hands, and they were King of the North Pole. They would right some of those ancestral wrongs. All of Northern Africa and the Middle East, Asia Minor, it was once Christian land, part of the Byzantine Empire. Who rules it now, but chaos? All of those men of my blood could impose peace with a rod of iron, slay whomever did not bow the knee, and take their wives as concubines and children as slaves.

  “But then I remembered the other half of my family and the Virgin from whom Clovis claimed to be descended. It made me call to memory all the other historical wrongs down all the other people.

  “Even an all powerful lord could not return all the ancestral lands back to the Picts and the Neanderthal, because they are wiped out. To whom would an all powerful king return the lands conquered by Marc Anthony, now that all of the line of Ptolemy is dead? There is no heir to Alexander the Great. Or can any king unmake the sorrows of those conquests? The ancestors of the Pharaohs obliterated the men of antique Ka and Iry-Hor and all the Scorpion Kings.”

  The old man was silent a moment, looking down at the spark in his hand. They he looked up
, mirth and sorrow mingled in his features in an expression of reckless madness.

  “So whose lands would you restore? Which wrongs would you right, and which would you leave unavenged? Absolute power, gentlemen! What would you do if you had it?”

  And, without any more warning than that, the old man tossed the spark in a long arc across the chapel to them.

  Because it was thrown at Tyler, he caught it by reflex. In wonder he stared at the little light. When he was a child, he would amuse himself by taking to magnets down from his mother's refrigerator, and trying to push the south pole against the south pole, and feel the unseen force wiggle in his little hands and force the magnets apart. Trying to hold the light felt just like that. Seen up close, the instrument was a spherical open armature as small as the pellet from an airgun, made of white lines and diamond chips, shaped something like a gyroscope spinning serenely, but with a reverse image of itself at its own crystal heart. Inside this, there was a smaller image turning oppositely, and then a smaller one yet.

  With the machine in his hand, he could hear a faint very high-pitched whistling, as if the air in the room were streaming out of a nearly-microscopic pinhole. The weird fear came over him that there was a black hole or some sort of space warp in his hand, and the molecules of air which ventured too near were being pulled out of the continuum into some other dimension or reality.

  He could also feel a tinkling of strange activity in his brain, as if something with no emotions whatsoever, or no emotions on any spectrum of thought a human being could understand, was listening to his thoughts, and waiting.

  “Me?” said Tyler was a sour laugh. “I'd wish I had a perfect body, endless life and eternal youth, and that I would be invited to live at the Playboy mansion, complete with hot- and cold-running booze, and hot- and hotter-running girls, and the age of consent lowered by two years in case one of them was sixteen, and any drugs I could name would be made legal, and McDonald's would open for business again, selling any drinks of any size they damn well please.

  “I wouldn't wish for the cure for cancer, or AIDS, or terminal stupidity, or anything like that. All I would wish for would be to live and let live.

  “And I'd end up like a total pig, surrounded by big empty beer cans and empty Big Mac wrappers and empty-headed babes with big boobs, and I would probably wind up killing myself out of boredom.

  “No, Father, I am not the guy that anyone should give absolute power to. The only smart thing to do with absolute power is give it up.”

  Tyler drew back his hand and started to throw the little spark back, but Hynkel struck him savagely in the neck with his elbow, so that Tyler stumbled and fell head-over-heels into one of the waist-high bays surrounding the pews, landing on the stone floor, the back of his head making contact with the stone with a sharp, loud noise.

  Despite that, Tyler rose rapidly to his feet and there was something odd to his movements. He leaped over the waist-high banister, and was back on his feet, fists clenched, almost as soon as his his head struck the floor. And he felt no pain. Cracking the back of his skull against the hard stone floor had not hurt him. He had felt the impact, but somehow, it had not even stunned him.

  But the most athletic acrobat could not possibly have leaped to his feet so suddenly. There was something fluid and unnatural in his speed and precision.

  Hynkel, breathing in great gasps like a man on the edge of panic, was holding the spark in his left hand, and staring wild-eyed at Tyler, trying not to look at the glittering wonder in his grasp.

  Tyler's unexpected recovery had startled him. Hynkel jumped awkwardly back, but his shoulder blade hit the open leaf of the double doors, and pushed it shut. The door was closed behind him, blocking his retreat.

  However, Tyler was so startled that his head did not hurt that he hesitated, looking not at Hynkel, but at his own closed fists. The sensation of strength, of immense well-being, was rushing through his muscles like an electrical current. What was happening to him?

  Before Tyler could refocus his attention, Hynkel shouted, “I want my Beretta Nine out of the weapon locker right here, right now, in my right hand!” And he held up his fingers.

  The air around Hynkel glowed white, and parts of the antique pews, the iron in the window frames, and large square nails out of the floor turned into a muddy liquid slurry whirling in midair that gathered around his hand. There was a brighter flash of light, and Hynkel was holding perfectly ordinary-looking and functional pistol, which was glowing red-hot as it solidified out of thin air.

  A moment later, the air was filled with screams, and the terrible smell of burnt flesh.

  The old priest grimaced sadly and addressed Hynkel mildly. “You should be careful, young man. It is not magic. When the ideal machine breaks apart and re-combines atoms and molecules, chemical energy is released as well as radioactive…”

  But Hynkel did not drop the weapon, either because his fear of Tyler drove him to ignore the hideous burns, or because his muscles and nerves had been damaged to the point where his fingers could not unclench.

  Despite Hynkel's gasping screams, Tyler could hear every word Father Nicodemus spoke with diamond-clear crispness. The church no longer seemed dark and dim, even though the one candle and little spark Hynkel clutched had not grown any brighter.

  Hynkel caught his breath, and shouted out profanely. “—! —!You are not taking this back. I don't want it for myself! I don't! But someone has to save the world!”

  He pointed the gun still clenched in his blackened, burnt, and still-sizzling hand at Tyler, then at the priest, then back at Tyler.

  “You should not use the name of the Lord in vain, my son,” said the priest calmly, as if unaware of the danger.

  “Stay back!” shouted Hynkel. “Let me show you what a man with an education does when he has absolute power! I wish every nuclear warhead, H-bomb and A-bomb, anywhere on the planet Earth was dissolved into nothing.”

  The skin of his face and chest was marred with little white spots that rapidly grew into blisters. His hair was falling out.

  Tyler said, “I guess that is not such a bad wish, I mean–”

  Hynkel interrupted him, shouting, “And that all the plans and diagrams for how to make them, no matter where they are, or how encrypted or encoded, was erased, so no one can make any more!”

  Tyler said, “That is enough good work for one day, Andy. Just give the little firefly back to the Father, okay?”

  Father Nicodemus said mildly, “Brendan was kind enough to repair the damage to me by idealizing— if that is the word—by perfecting and glorifying the body which he had damaged. And he repaired the wreckage he made of the church, so I saw the ideal machine does not make things out of nothing. It draws on its surroundings for raw materials.”

  “No!” Hynkel shouted, “I won't give it back. You will see! I can turn the world into a paradise now that I have the power to do it! The power! Infinite power!”

  Tyler said, “Whoa. That don't sound good…”

  Father Nicodemus said, “Not infinite. The ideal machine has its limits.”

  “No one will build any more nuclear weapons,” Hynkel declared, “Every scientist and engineer and anyone else who knows how to build an atomic bomb will vanish into nothing! I want them dead! Every last one of them! And I want–”

  Tyler leaped toward Hynkel. Once more, he moved much more quickly than he could have imagined, as quickly as the bright spot shed by a flashlight can move from one wall to another with the flip of a wrist. He grabbed Hynkel's left wrist with both hands and twisted it around behind his back. He must have twisted with more force that he knew, because he heard the bone snap.

  But perhaps he did not have the fighting spirit he needed, because when he broke his co-pilot's arm, the shock made his grip grow weak. Hynkel, however, had it, for a man with a broken arm, if he is brave enough and drunk on adrenaline, and sufficiently filled with the fury of battle, can fight without feeling. Hynkel spun around and clubbed Tyler across the
face with his gun hand. Hynkel could not pull the trigger with his burned right finger, so he raised his left hand, took the weapon awkwardly in both hands, then fired the gun.

  The impact of the bullet striking him made Tyler feel as if he had been hit in the face with a baseball bat. He was thrown backwards, but quickly recovered his balance, and he did not feel any pain whatsoever. Hynkel had stumbled back. The recoil of the pistol was more than his wounded hand could hold, and he had dropped his weapon, which was lying between his feet. Hynkel was clutching his right hand in this left, and his eyes glistened with tears of pain, but he did not cry out again.

  There was no sign of the little spark anywhere. Whether it had gone out, or where it had fallen, none of them knew.

  In astonishment, Tyler brought his hands to his face. He felt no blood, no bullet hole, nothing. His face was perfect. If anything, he felt healthier than normal. He was filled with a strength swelling like a symphony, and the tips of his fingers as well as the flesh of his face seemed to be more sensitive than before.

  Tyler looked directly behind him at the bullet hole which had shattered one of the stained glass windows. He could see forty yards away, where there was a bullet hole in the bark of a tree, and, when he peered closely at the lump of lead, he was sure it was the nine millimeter slug from the gun.

  Tyler noticed that he could also see the sedans approaching down Point Lookout Road. Four plainclothes officers, part of the private military of the National Security Agency, were in each car, and each man in his shoulder holster was carrying a SIG Sauer P228 9mm sidearm.

  He also saw, even further away, in the Armory in Building 430 near the eastern gate of the base, the locker where Hynkel's piece had been stored was crumpled like a tin can, or a sunken submarine, as if removing the weapon had removed so much mass from the middle of the metal box that the walls imploded. Whatever the ideal machine was, it was not forgiving like the friendly blue genii in the cartoon. It carried out its orders without thought, without hesitation, without mercy.