Brighten to Incandescence 17 Stories

by Michael Bishop

You got it, the bartender said. But I have to say, your pal there don’t much look the Manhattan type.

  M. smiled but only with his mouth. I’m not the Manhattan type, he said. But this is a—a special occasion.

  I placed both hands on the bar and leaned toward M., who eyed the strolling girl with a hard-to-read hunger. Even after more than a year together, he could startle me with odd enthusiasms (for bluegrass music or salt-water taffy) and untimely cruelties (as when he told a ticket taker at a movie that she must lose some weight or expect lifelong spinsterhood). Please say no more, I whispered.

  A very special occasion, M. said more loudly.

  Tattoos of blue barbed wire circled the bartender’s upper arms. A hot-white pearl shone in one of his earlobes. No kidding? he said. You get promoted?

  Tomorrow I get promoted, M. said.

  But you’re partying in advance.

  M. clasped my neck and yanked me up next to him, the heat from his nostrils warming my jaw. Tomorrow, he said, we both get promotions.

  Not that I aint glad to have yall here tonight, the bartender said, but most folks wait until after to tie one on.

  I broke away from M.’s grip. The woman in boots assumed a vulgar hoochie-coochie crouch. She winked at me and rolled her shoulders.

  Circumstances do not permit us to wait, M. told the bartender. Carpe diem, as you folks sometimes say, Bubba.

  The bartender’s ruddy face darkened. What?

  Seize the moment, seize the day, seize the nation, said M., returning the muscular American’s glare.

  Please, I said, our drinks.

  Through the smoke haze and the syncopated air, the bartender studied me as if I had dropped from the moon. You bet—one Bloody Mary and one Manhattan. He looked at M. You want a marshmallow in that?

  Of course not, M. said. A pearl, perhaps.

  The bartender stared at M., then swung his concave red face toward me. Longer I talk to your arrogant friend, he said, the more doubts I develop about what he’s got in his wallet. You follow me, little man?

  M. produced his wallet and riffled a bundle of crisp bills under the bartender’s nose. Does this sedate your suspicions? My friend and I have jobs. Good jobs. High-paying jobs. We fly airplanes.

  Pfaugh, the bartender said. But he fetched our drinks, slammed them down, and swaggered away.

  Unbelievers all around us, alone in our pocket of obedience, M. and I drank and watched the show.

  Good women are obedient, M. declared. Give them money, and they’ll do almost anything you ask.

  I thought, Good women guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them—but these hid their feet in boots and showed what the obedient conceal. M. stuffed bills into my hand and nodded at the woman on the runway.

  Go on, he said. Buy yourself a harlot tonight. Before noon tomorrow, virgins will surround you.

  Soon, my money deep in her boot, the blonde slid along my thighs at a table in the club’s center. A chair away, M. had his own dancer, and the techno-music gave both women a strong beat by which to shimmy and beguile. May God forgive me, I am but a man, and I roused. M. had no such difficulty. He threw his head back and laughed in pleasure and contempt, his responses bound to each other like twin infants with a single angry heart.

  Perhaps I sneered, for the blonde, still straddling my knees, tilted her head along with her shoulders. You don’t really like me, do you?

  Her words took me aback. I gave you money, I said.

  Yes, to do what I’m doing.

  Why do you do it? Does money have such value?

  Apparently. She barked a laugh, then looked at me coyly. You can call me Marie. When I made no answer, she said, Or you can let me move on to a man who’ll appreciate me.

  A man who appreciates you, I said, would never let you set foot here. A man who appreciates you would beat you before he let you—

  Let me what?

  Disgrace both yourself and your family.

  Ah, an uptight God-squad member. Is this another Save the Strippers campaign? Did your church take up an offering so you and your stuck-up friend could go fishing for our frail female souls?

  I did not reply to these impertinences.

  Let me tell you why I do this. God gave me this body and set me down in this place. When I had no idea what calling to follow, He appeared in a dream and told me that if I applied for work here, the manager would hire me, and in two years I’d have enough money to start college in nursing or chiropractic. You know what, fella? I just about do.

  God told you to strip for school money? I said.

  As sure as I sit here. I’ve had visions off and on since I turned eleven.

  You’ve deluded yourself.

  No more than you and ugly Mister Moses have. She nodded at M. Coming in here to win my poor lost girlfriends and me for Jesus.

  You badly mistake our purpose.

  You badly mistake mine.

  Both the bartender and the club bouncer had occupied themselves elsewhere, and I shoved this Marie person off my lap and begged M. to end his heart-steeling frolic and to hasten from that pit of iniquity. He waved me off, but I persisted, and at length he got rid of his naked succubus by giving her more money and a copy of The Recital. Thus bolstered, we departed. Soon we would bind the hands of women more modestly dressed than these, but no less deluded.

  In the ruins of the fallen towers, an ash-covered fireman found a copy of a charred document in a script unintelligible to him. He passed it along to a law-enforcement agent and trudged back to the unending search for bodies.

  The Procedure

  FROM THE BLUEJOINT PRAIRIE ON WHICH THE SPACE port lay, the city of Ganhk resembles an assemblage of glassware on climbing red-slate shelves.

  I stumbled from the Desideratum with my fellow steerage passengers, many of us Corderists, and saw the planet’s most famous city glittering across the plain like an exotic bottle collection. (Locals call the planet Doen, but everyone else uses the name of its Ommundi discoverer, Sagence.)

  Shielding my eyes, I steadied myself on the tarmac and ogled Ganhk’s sparkling glass battlements—immense pastel replicas of test tubes and retorts. A magnetrain would take us to this city. There, in a chapterhouse of the Galenic League, a surgeon would destroy the tumor that made and sustained me Corderist.

  A female voice said, “What do you think, Drei?”

  The strangeness of this new place—its light, gravity, and smell—had unsettled me, but how could I fail to admire the artful sanity of its design?

  “Lovely,” I said. “Nothing lovelier under heaven.”

  “A lovely place to have one’s hope of heaven cut away,” my friend said.

  “If that can really occur, maybe we’ll find heaven here on Doen itself.”

  The smile on Zarafise Koh’s face hinted that our long glide through iduum space had multiplied rather than allayed her misgivings.

  “Pray,” I advised her.

  “Why? Haven’t the lucidists shown that prayer doesn’t work, except maybe as an anxiety inhibitor?”

  “Then use it in that way,” I said.

  “I’ve never found it more than fitfully helpful,” Zarafise said. “Besides, nothing so irrational could ever work here on Sagence.”

  She had a right to her bitterness. On the other hand, no one had forced her to come. The majority lucidists—of Doen, Trope, Tezcatl, or any of the other Ommundi worlds—would never perform the procedure on an unwilling patient. The idea of a coerced surgery appalled them. However, any sufferer of a cultural or a maverick superstition who wanted the procedure could have it, free of charge. Ommundi footed the entire bill, offering transport (in steerage) to Doen, preliminary psychotherapy, and the procedure itself. Doen’s physicians had pioneered this technique and then restricted it—as a spur to the planetary economy and a boost to their prestige throughout the Commonweal—to medical facilities in Ganhk. Lucidists who objected to this restriction on a procedure designed to eradicate superstition, to let in the light of
reason, earned the monolithic cold shoulder of the planet’s most powerful nation.

  In any case, Zarafise Koh had come voluntarily to Doen, which she called Sagence. Hundreds of other religionists, including Corderists like me, had accompanied her. Among our number you could also find animanists, witnessers, eldeists, nirvanim, mahdiacs, and vacuum baptists. All of us had a shot at the procedure as the best way to assimilate fully to the dominant lucidism of the Ommundi Commonweal. Like me, Koh had her doubts that Ganhk’s surgeons would truly rescue us from either our faiths or our marginalization.

  Children popped up on the tarmac, almost as if they had ridden hidden elevators to its surface. They wore scarves of incandescent blue, green, yellow, and red. They tripped about us, barefoot or slippered, charming almost every one of us from iduumship steerage. The children had come as escorts. To the amplified strains of Wind Is to Sky as Voice Is to Mind, they took our hands and skipped with us across the tarmac toward the white pylons of the magnetrain cradle.

  “Such spry, loving children,” said Zarafise as the children tugged us along.

  “They don’t appear brainwashed.” I smiled as I said this.

  Zarafise frowned, then grinned in acquiescence as the children danced us up into the magnetrain cars.

  Don’t ask me either where our escorts vanished once we had boarded that ivory train or how the city of Ganhk absorbed such a flood of believers once we’d poured onto the tiled reception platform among those daunting bottle towers. You would think that the efficient processing of so many patients would require long lines, reception gates, a storm of broadcast directions and announcements, but none of these methods prevailed.

  There on the platform, a petite girl separated me from Zarafise Koh and the others and led me into a tunnel through which citizens strolled like people on holiday. In every tributary, the tunnel had a beveled skylight and well-spaced festoonings of plants and banners. At length, it funneled us into a chapterhouse of the Galenic League.

  “You have Dr. Garer,” the elvin young woman said. “Through there.” She nodded at a porcelain-edged doorway.

  “But you didn’t ask my name,” I said. “How do you know I’m intended as Dr. Garer’s patient?”

  “Whoever I chose was hers. If another had chosen you, you would have gone elsewhere.”

  “Everyone on the Desideratum has an individual doctor?” No prior briefing—and we’d had dozens—had mentioned this fact. Mentioning it would have eased many anxieties.

  “Ganhk has thousands of doctors,” the girl said. “And here on Doen we love every citizen of the Ommundi Commonweal.”

  Spoken, I thought, like an amiable little robot. But she smiled, and the light in her eyes sparked from within, not from the foyer’s pale lavender wallglow.

  Dr. Garer pushed aside her amanuensis screen and struggled up from behind a fortress of disc filers, research aids, and one brand-new-looking book. She seized my hands, her gray head lowered but her gray eyes searching my face. For what? A sign of my fanaticism?

  “I’m Dr. Pinalat Garer, a counselor-surgeon originally from Iiol.” She smiled. “Iiol is a small village west of here.”

  Standing a hand taller than I, she hunched her shoulders to minimize the difference. Her work jacket featured cloudpanels and a few disconcerting blue blinkthreads. In fact, it dazzled me—just as, in worshipful settings, the icons of Corderism have always done.

  “And your name?” said Dr. Garer.

  “Drei Roh Sfel.”

  “Well, Citizen Sfel—”

  “Please use my friendname,” I said. “Drei.”

  “All right,” said Dr. Garer uncomfortably. She levered her amanuensis screen around to summon the Drei Roh Sfel file. It took her seven clicks to get mine (I have fortuitous namesakes on more than five Ommundi worlds), but my date of birth and the thumbnail bio authenticated the file for us.

  “Do the procedure on me,” I said. “Cut away my susceptibility to the God delusion.”

  “Easy,” said Dr. Garer, pointing me to a chair. “No surgery without therapy. No therapy without empathy. No empathy without acquaintance.”

  “No acquaintance without intimidation,” I said.

  Dr. Garer looked surprised. “You were forced to enroll as an excision candidate?”

  I shook my head. “Oh no. No single person compelled me. No one threatened violence, or any other penalty, if I decided to remain a … a dupe. I came freely.”

  “But you remain of two minds about it?”

  “Of course. Lucidist views have such widespread force that one always feels the pressure to, well, to shed that pressure.”

  “Societal pressure?”

  “What else?”

  “Everyone feels that, Drei. You can shed some of it simply by saying no to superstitious cant.”

  “I have to feel that no before I can voice it.”

  “Certainly,” she said.

  “Meanwhile, throughout most of the Ommundi Commonweal, it’s a stigmatizing thing to believe as I do.”

  “Which makes you a good surgery candidate. I can remove the growth responsible for your delusion, thus freeing you from any societal stigma as well.”

  “Ah,” I said. “The rehabilitated believer.”

  Dr. Garer heard my sarcasm and rubbed her cloudpanels, which crackled with holofabric lightnings.

  Either my long trip or Ganhk’s strangeness, if not both together, suddenly undid me. I covered my mouth and fought to suppress a sob. This sob sounded, even to me, like the wheeze of a steer toppling in a slaughterhouse.

  “Go ahead,” Dr. Garer said. “No shame. Let it cycle.”

  Given permission, I wept.

  “You’ve agreed to what you must regard as a soulectomy,” said Dr. Garer. “Of course you grieve. You view the procedure less as a cure than as an assisted suicide.”

  I had hoped for, but not really anticipated, this degree of understanding. I looked up.

  Dr. Garer said, “We honor such responses, but remember that you come to them in error, through the insidious agency of the growth that I want to remove.”

  “Lambs to the slaughter,” I said. “Passive sheep.”

  Dr. Garer said, “This pathological self-abuse stems directly from the tenets of your belief system, which has its own origin in a delusional soul structure.”

  Bemused, I shook my head.

  “Would a passive lamb have had the courage to contract for the removal of such a structure?” Dr. Garer said. “And to come such a distance to bring it about?”

  “A stronger believer would never have admitted the need,” I said. “A stronger believer—”

  “—would never have come,” Dr. Garer said.

  “Exactly. I’ve surrendered to spiritual genocide. So of course I scold, I second-guess myself.”

  “Go on.”

  I said, “I see the surgery that you want to do, and that I still think I want done, as aborting the god-seed that makes me me. I envy your intellectual and emotional freedom, but I also envy the militant faithful, whom I’ve betrayed by choosing to come here.”

  I stopped. Was this same conversation occurring in five hundred other chapterhouses? Was Citizen Koh undergoing a like shakedown elsewhere? If so, damn the Doenr lucidists for their ages-old strategy of Divide and Conquer.

  I put my hands in my armpits. None of my fellow, or even my enemy, religionists could see or hear me, but God, I still believed, could. I appealed to the First One through the holy go-between of the Ladlamb, El Cordero.

  “Praying?” said Dr. Garer.

  “Trying to,” I said. “Not allowed?”

  Pinalat Garer chuckled brightly. “If it harms no one else, do what you feel inclined to do. After our procedure, the urge will no longer afflict you, except as a rare vestigial tic.”

  “Does that mean you sometimes pray?”

  “A silly blurt or two during crises.” Dr. Garer shook her iron-gray head in happy self-reproach. “Even lucidists still have tailbones, Drei. That doesn�
��t make us monkeys. Not permanently, anyway.”

  I smiled, but, as I did, I prayed, knowing at once both peace and shame.

  I slept that night in a room of the chapterhouse to which Dr. Garer belonged: a room clean and spare, with a reedlike mat on one wall, a handheld summoner, and a port through which I could view the city without yielding privacy. Ganhk did not consist solely of glassy buildings and vivid slate tiers, but also of ragleafed trees, lofty stairwalks, and a river cutting through it in a series of locks and waterfalls. Engineering rather than naked geography had made Ganhk beautiful.

  Zarafise Koh and my other steeragemates had similar digs in other chapterhouses of the Galenic League, private rooms to which preprogrammed child guides had delivered them. Dr. Garer had advised that I spend the evening sorting my thoughts, preparing for further talk, and resting. Sleep would help me vanquish my iduum funk and my tendency to second-guess myself.

  “Avoid loud music, crude teledramas, oversavory food, and recursive self-debate,” she had said. “Most of which you’ve processed already or you’d have never come.”

  I longed to see Zarafise or any other Corderist. In fact, I would have happily spoken with even a turncoat mahdiac or Eastern vehiclist. I didn’t believe what they believed, but I knew what the prospect of having the physical source of their faith removed felt like. Like agreeing to one’s own lobotomy. Like watching a loved one jump into an annihilating flow of ice or magma. Like death and grief at the same time.

  But for additional counseling sessions, my procedure could have happened on an outpatient basis. Often, on Doen, it does, for Doen has a low incidence of religious fervor. When it does occur, it occurs amidst born rationalists (lucidists, as they style themselves here) who have already laid the groundwork for the patients’ acceptance of the procedure and their subsequent reintegration into Sagency society.

  As far as my own wounded faith would allow, then, I trusted Dr. Garer, awaiting the procedure with an odd mix of surrender and foreboding. I also prayed for El Cordero to come dwell in me throughout the lightscalpeling designed to evict Him from my person: Help me stay the course in slaying You.