Night of Light

  Carmody put the spool in the beltbag. "Why do you give it to me? Do you expect something to happen to you?"

  "I don't know anything except that you were to get the last chapter. Will you promise that you'll have it published?"

  "Do you realize what you're asking? I'm a priest of a Church that is threatened by your religion. Why should I have it published?"

  "Because you are the one who is entrusted with it. That's all I am able to tell you."

  Carmody said, "I can't promise anything. I'd have to consult with my superiors first. They will undoubtedly want to hear it themselves, and what they will do with it after that I can't say."

  "Very well. But at least promise me that you'll listen to it before anyone does. Then you may act as you see fit."

  "Very well. Now I'd like to be alone for a while. The only place is the roof top. How can I get to there?"

  Yess gave him directions. As Carmody started to leave, Yess embraced and kissed him. "You are my Father," Yess whispered.

  "In one way I am," Carmody said. "But I wonder what a scientific comparison of blood and cell types would show? Tell me, do you feel lonely? Do you think you might have made a terrible mistake by commanding all to go through the Night?"

  "I am alone but not lonely. Don't mistake my expression of love for you as a weakness or cry for help. I am Yess, a being you cannot understand, one that only another Yess could understand. Or, which may seem strange to you, an Algul."

  Yess walked away. Carmody watched him and thought of what a splendid being, physically, the naked god was. And he thought of the impossibility of Yess' existence. Only a miracle, or some form of supernatural power, could have created him.

  This was the overpowering factor in the spread of Boontism; this was what made it so dangerous to all other religions, not just those of Earth alone.

  When he stepped out of the gravcage onto the rooftop, Carmody was startled. Subconsciously, he must have expected an unrelieved flatness. Most large buildings of the Federation had level and unobstructed roofs to receive aircraft. But he had forgotten that he was not only on the planet of Dante's Joy but on the high place of the Temple of Boonta Herself. And before, behind, below and above was a maelstrom of stone shapes, a mimetomantic nightmare.

  Originally, the rooftop must have been meters thick, a solid slab of marble webbed with many colors. From it some mad Titan had chiseled an inferno of writhing figures. And he must have started from the very spot on which Carmody stood, since the flow and rush and swirl of rock was outward in every direction from this center, as if the figures were waves twisted by the force of a whirlpool and he was at the bottom of a hole created by the vortex in the marble sea.

  Nevertheless, despite the first impression of an impenetrable host, there were avenues, and through one of these Carmody made a slow and cautious progress toward the edge of the rooftop.

  Savage and long-necked and crawling things, flat-tailed, tentacled, and flippered, jostled each other and turned to bite at one another or even at themselves. Many were coiled in furious combat or even more furious copulation, in disregard of difference of kind.

  Carmody had to duck under a huge head barring his path. The long teeth projecting downward tugged against the back of his cloak. Abruptly, he was in a gigantomachy of land monsters. These, like the thalassic things behind him, were eating or chasing each other or mating with a frenzy that only a master could have evoked from the inanimate marble. Yet, the faces of the creatures, no matter how savage, contained more intelligence and, somehow, more a sense of striving forward than those of the beasts Carmody had first encountered.

  When these ceased, there was a group of lonely statues, of past Yesses and Alguls. These also had jewels for eyes, set in such a fashion that they seemed to follow Carmody as he passed their owners. One of the Alguls sent a chill through Carmody, so evil was his stare.

  He hurried past the Algul to the rampart at the edge of the roof, near the statue of a Yess. This, too, gave him a start and a chill, since he recognized the features of the god he had murdered so many years ago. Only now, it did not seem so long ago. It was as if he had just left him, because Yess held a half-eaten candle in his hand and there was a red wound upon his forehead and one ear was half shot off. Carmody tried to ignore the reminder of the man he had once been.

  He looked out over the ramparts at the city of Rak. Around the horizon, distant and huge fires burned. The haze above the flames was a light purple, and it seemed to coil and writhe. Snakes, octopuses, rags of faces appeared, dissolved, and re-formed into new images. The fires, he knew, were coming from the recently built suburbs surrounding the massive stone heart of the old city. The wooden houses were burning to the ground, and the firemen were dead, fighting for their lives and souls, or else had helped touch off the flames themselves.

  From far below, cries rose. There were screams, shouts, bellows, and, now and then, the punctuation marks of small-arms. The firing from the besieging Algulists immediately below had ceased. Perhaps they had turned on each other and were fighting with the weapons they had been born with -- or those they had developed in the metamorphoses the Night sometimes brought.

  The flicker of the sun around the curve of the planet gripped him then, as if the star's great hands had twisted a cord around him and pulled both ends. He felt squeezed, and he thought he would burst.

  "John Carmody!" wailed a voice, far off and plaintive. "Evil John Carmody!"

  It was the voice of Mrs. Fratt.

  He looked to his right, for it sounded as if she stood somewhere at the distant end of the rooftop. But there was no one there.

  "Carmody! I want my son back! My eyes!"

  He began shaking, for he fully expected her to materialize out of the air as Mary had done. But there was no hardening of the atmosphere, only the mauve flickerings.

  Again the voice keened. "You are a killer, John Carmody! You began as one and you end as one!"

  "Mrs. Fratt," he said aloud, then he stopped. He left the roof and went down in the gravcage to the room in which Lieftin had died.

  The others were sitting on chairs around a great round table that had not been there before.

  Carmody asked Yess for permission to speak and told them of the voice.

  "You feel guilty because of Mrs. Fratt," Yess said. "You know that at the time you should have continued to try to talk her out of her vengeance. But you panicked and allowed your old reflexes to take over."

  "I couldn't go on any longer with persuasion," the priest said heatedly. "She was not alone. Abdu would have insisted she carry through or, if she had refused, he would have carried it through himself."

  "If you believed that in your innermost self, you would not now be hearing Mrs. Fratt," Yess replied.

  "I am not a saint!" Carmody said loudly.

  Yess did not reply. There was silence for a minute.

  The men and women at the table brooded with their eyes fixed on their wine cups and the half-eaten cakes made in the image of the Seven Fathers. The priests and priestesses sitting on one side of the table or scattered throughout the huge chamber were mute or else conversed in whispers.

  Finally, Tand raised his head and spoke.

  "Don't despair, John. All of us who have gone through more than one Night have experienced these things. We call them 'residues.' You may go through seven Nights and still not be cleansed of them.

  "In fact, and I do not say this to frighten you but to acquaint you with reality, which is in essence a variety of potentialities. . ."

  He stopped, cleared his throat, and smiled. "I'll try not to be too long-winded. There have been cases, exceedingly rare, of what we call retroconversion. The most famous, infamous rather, is that of Ruugro. He was one of the Fathers of the previous Yess. During the seventh Night after the previous Yess was conceived, Ruugro switched over. No one knows why or how, but he became an Algulist. And he almost effected the birth of a new Algul before he was killed."

  "Then we're never safe?"
Carmody said.

  "Every breath of life draws in good and evil," Yess said."Strife accompanies a man with each step. There is no letup."

  "Has a Yess ever become an Algul?" the bishop said.

  "Never," Yess replied. "But then the sons of Boonta, though they may die, are not mortal."

  As the long Night wore on, Carmody tried to sort out his thoughts about Yess, and found that he could not. How could the god of "good," if he were what he claimed to be, cause this devastation? He was roused from his thoughts by a priest who spoke to Yess. "Son of Boonta, the Algulists are massing before the Temple. They may be getting ready to attack."

  Yess nodded and went to the table on which stood the golden candlestick holder in the form of a coiling serpent. The candle that should have been there was missing. That long time ago, Carmody had so thoroughly destroyed the body of the murdered Yess with his panpyric, only a few ashes had been left. These had been mixed with the wax of the trogur bird, but the present Yess had eaten all of the tiny candle several Nights before.

  Seeing the empty holder, Carmody felt guilty for a moment. He was aware that the Kareenans thought the new Yess imbibed divinity and spiritual power from eating the ashes of the old Yess and that Carmody's act had robbed them of this sacrament. Yet, though he knew that the Kareenans were conscious of what he had done and must resent the act, he had not heard a word of reproach.

  Yess, standing by the table, touched the candleholder with his hand as if he thought he would, at least, derive some strength from its former associations. He raised his head, shut his eyes, and began to chant. He prayed thus in the ancient language permitted to the gods alone.

  Tand held one of Carmody's hands and a priestess held the other. All except Yess were linked thus. They stood side by side, the entire line forming a crescent whose center was behind Yess and whose horns curved outward past him and then a little inward. From the beginning of the chanting, Carmody had felt a thrill run through his hands, up his arms and across his body, like a weak electrical current. As Yess continued, his voice louder and louder and the phrases seeming to become longer and longer, the cold prickling built up in Carmody. The torches on the walls flickered more and more, or seemed to do so. However, when he concentrated on a single torch, it burned steadily. The air in the upper reaches of the chamber became several shades darker, the light-purple hue intensifying unevenly until bars and coils formed. These shifted a little, writhed slowly, bent downward, twisted upward. The room became colder so suddenly that it seemed as if the heat were being driven out by something threatening.

  Sweat trickled down Carmody's armpits and over his ribs. The iciness and the static charge -- the aura of panic -- grew stronger. His heart thudded, and his legs quivered. He felt that the walls were about to peel away in a flood of utterly cold light -- light that would not only blind his eyes, but would fill the deepest and darkest recesses of his body and that entity he called his soul so full of icy luminescence that reason and the senses could not tolerate it.

  "Steady!" Tand murmured. "I, too, feel it, but you must stand! If you don't, you are lost! And so are we! Boonta does not condone weakness!"

  The door swung open, and a mob of Kareenans rushed in. Most of them were in their original humanoid form, but a few had metamorphosed. Their leader, a man Carmody did not recognize, had two tigerlike canines projecting over his lower lip, and a long nose hardened into a leathery sharp-tipped beak. He held a huge sword that dripped with blood. He raised it above his head and opened his mouth to shout. Then he, and all those with him froze. His arms stayed up, the sword fell from his hands and clattered on the floor.

  Yess went on chanting. Those in the crescent let go each other's hands, went to the immobilized men and women, took their weapons and dispassionately slew them. Only when the last one lay dead did they cease. Carmody alone took no part in the slaughter, though he had felt the desire to kill.

  Yess stopped chanting. Slowly, too slowly for Carmody, the Presence withdrew.

  The god examined the bodies. He shook his head.

  "Rilg and Abog are not here. They must still be outside, waiting until the Seven Fathers of Algul have gathered. They sent these to test the temper of the Mother. She favors us at this moment. Next time, they will hope the Mother will allow them to kill me. Then, and only then, can Algul be conceived and born."

  Carmody left the room to go back up to the rooftop again. There he prayed, but he felt that the strange stars seen so dimly through the coiling haze were not those his God had made. He could not shake the feeling of desolation that came over him. Was it possible that there could be more than one God, a multitude of Creators?

  Perhaps Yess was right. There were local saviors, and there was also an oversavior. Once the oversavior appeared, the locals must go. This would not mean that Carmody's own religion was false; it was true as far as it had gone. Now another aspect was revealed, and one more bit of truth was added to the jigsaw puzzle of the universe.

  "Help me in my doubt!" he cried out.

  A star fell through the purple. Far below, something huge laughed and laughed.

  He paid no attention to either. He had seen many meteors in the Kareenan sky before, and he knew that it was only a coincidence that the monster was laughing. Besides, if he were superstitious enough to grasp at anything for a sign or an omen, one had canceled out the other.

  No, it was an inward sign he wanted. But there was no answer, within or without.

  Suddenly, shouts rose from below. Guns fired. Carmody whirled and ran to the gravcage. He started downward, but as he did so, bullets exploded against the bottom of the cage. Carmody threw himself over the waist-high fence and onto the floor that the cage was passing. There were more shouts from below, then screams. The gunfire ceased and was followed by a crashing sound.

  He looked down the shaft and saw the cage wrecked on the bottom floor. Several bodies were smashed between it and the wall; legs and arms protruded from beneath the shattered metal.

  Firing broke out somewhere else. Yess and his disciples were not all dead. Perhaps the invaders could be driven out again. He ran toward the firing, lost it because of the thick stone walls, and decided to move more cautiously. After a moment, he heard the battle again. At the end of a corridor, he found Tand and some priests exchanging shots with the Algulists along a winding staircase. The Enemy were poking gun barrels around the corners and firing blindly up the stairs.

  Joining Tand, Carmody said, "Do you think they have kasers?"

  "If they had them, they'd be using them."

  "Where's Yess?"

  "In his apartment." Tand looked at his wristwatch. "The Night will soon be ended."

  He hesitated. "I don't understand it."

  "Understand what?"

  "How they can be so strong and in the House of Boonta. Well, let them profane it. When the Night is over, Boonta will catch them like rats in a trap."

  There was an explosion halfway up the staircase. The defenders reeled back before the ear-stunning blast of air and smoke that followed. Shouts came through the smoke, and the Algulists stumbled upon them through the clouds. The fighting was swift and savage, but the Algulists were killed.

  Tand, Carmody, and three priests were left standing. They ran up the staircase to the next floor and took positions. Two self-propelled grenades landed near and began spitting greenish smoke.

  Tand threw a grenade toward those on the stairs, and the explosion hurled the gas-expellers back down. Immediately after, Tand ordered Carmody and the priests to retreat to the next floor.

  There Yess appeared with twenty-eight priests and priestesses.

  "There are too many," he said. "They'll be coming in from all sides. We must make a stand on the rooftop."

  "What about fliers?" Carmody said. "Won't we be vulnerable there?"

  Tand said, "I imagine that fliers, like kasers, have all been wrecked."

  Yess led the way slowly and with dignity. Carmody, sweating and expecting at any time to be at
tacked from the rear, wished that they would hurry.

  When they reached the roof, he helped the others set up some furniture they had brought as barricades on the seven stairs that gave access to the roof. Yess strode back and forth, between the savage stone figures, while the others worked. Now and then, he looked up at the strands of haze floating above. They were beginning to pale, and the sun could be seen as a great milky globe.

  "Boonta will be making Her appearance soon," Tand said to Carmody. "Then we will go down and see what we must do to rebuild our world."

  Yess had stopped. His eyes were turned upward, but his head was cocked as if he were listening.

  "Mother is here."

  His features twisted with anguish. He cried out, "I have not called Her yet! But She comes!"

  The rest were silent. One of the priests, white-faced, crooked a finger at them. Carmody stood behind the man who had summoned them and listened. Far off, faintly up the stairwell, the sound of singing arose. The words were not intelligible, but the tone was triumphant.

  "They are hailing the birth of Algul!" Tand said.

  He looked at Yess. "But that is impossible! You are still living!"

  Yess replied. "Be quiet. Listen."

  The singing had stopped. There were no more sounds from below, and none came from the city outside the Temple. Tand opened his mouth, closed it when Yess motioned for silence. Several minutes passed while Carmody wondered what Yess was listening for.

  A moment later, his question was answered. Weakly at first, then stronger, a baby wailed.

  Yess exhaled slowly and deeply. "Aah!"

  A male Kareenan voice came up to them. "Listen, fallen god, and you who serve him. Listen. The newly bom son of Boonta, Algul, cried your doom! Listen!"

  Yess shouted, "Stand where we may see you. Let me see my brother!"

  There was a laugh. The Algulist shouted back, "Do you think I am a fool? You would kill me and, far worse, the infant Algul!"

  "That's Abog's voice," Tand said. He shouted, "Abog! You spirit of evil! Where is your leader, Rilg?"

  "I killed him during the second attack! The fool is dead now, and I am the chief of the Fathers who have survived!"