“And the Nathian,” Orne interrupted.
“To be sure,” the Abbod said. “And this civilization boasts of many techniques for the human to know himself—reconditioning, sophisticated microsurgical resources, the enforced application of acultural toning. How could there be anything about yourself that you still needed to know?”
“I just ... knew there was.”
“Why? How?”
“There’s always something more we need to know about anything. That’s the way it is in an infinite universe.”
“A rare insight,” the Abbod said. “Have you ever been afraid without knowing precisely why?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“Indeed,” the Abbod agreed. “You speak the words, but I do not believe you act upon your insight. Ahhhh, if we only had the time to enroll you in the study of thaumaturgical psychiatry and the ancient Christians.”
“Enroll me in what?”
“There were mental sciences long before the techniques developed by your civilization,” the Abbod said. “The Christeros religion preserves many fragments of such techniques. You would find such study valuable.”
Orne shook his head. This wasn’t going the way it should. He felt defensive, outmaneuvered. Yet, all he faced was one skinny human in a ridiculous nightshirt.
No ...
Orne corrected himself. He faced much more than that. The sense of power here could not be ignored.
The Abbod said: “Do you really believe you came here to protect your precious I-A, to discover if we were fomenting war?”
“That has to be part of the reason,” Orne said.
“And what if you discovered that we were planning a war? What then? Are you the surgeon? Are you prepared to cut out the infection and leave society in its former health?”
Orne felt a flare of anger which receded as quickly as it had come. Health? The concept bothered him. What was health?
“All around us,” the Abbod said, “Shadowy forces exist. Now and again they break through the encrusting dimensions, and they coalesce into forms tangible enough that we are aware of them. You are aware of such forces right now. If we view them from the viewpoint of life, some of these forces are healthy, some unhealthy. There are ways in which life can speak to these forces, but our communications do not always produce the results we anticipate.”
Silently, Orne stared at the Abbod, aware with a ringing sense of hollowness that they had embarked on a perilous course. He felt forces surging within him, wild and terrible.
The Abbod said: “Do you not see parallels between the things we have thus far discussed?”
“I …” Orne gulped. “Maybe.”
“The best of a supremely mechanistic scientific society weighed you, Orne, and assigned you a niche in its scheme of things. Does that niche fit you?”
“You know it doesn’t.”
“Something remained in you,” the Abbod said, “which your civilization could not touch; just as there always remains something which your I-A does not touch.”
Orne felt a lump in his throat, thought of Gienah, of Hamal and Sheleb. He said: “Sometimes we touch too much.”
“Of course,” the Abbod agreed. “But most of every iceberg remains beneath its sea. Thus it is with Amel. Thus it is with you, with the I-A, with every manifestation we can recognize.”
Again, Orne felt the surge of anger. “These are just words,” he muttered. “Nothing but words!”
The Abbod closed his eyes, sighed. He spoke softly: “The Guru Pasawan, who led the Ramakrishnanas into the Great Unification which we now know as the Ecumenical Truce, taught the divinity of the soul, the unity of all existence, the oneness of the Godhead, the harmony of all religions, the inexorable flow of eternity …”
“I’ve had enough religious pap!” Orne snapped. “You forget: I’ve been through some of your machines. I know how you manipulate the …”
“Consider this in the nature of a history lesson,” the Abbod murmured, opening his glistening eyes to stare at Orne.
Orne fell silent, abashed at his emotional outburst. Why had he done that? What pressures were concealed here?
“The discovery and interpretation of psi tends to confirm the Guru Pasawan,” the Abbod said. “Thus far, our postulates remain secure.”
“Oh?” And Orne wondered at this; surely, the Abbod wasn’t going to venture a scientific proof of religion!
The Abbod said: “All of mankind acting together represents a great psi force, an energy system. The temporary words are unimportant because the observable fact remains. Sometimes, we call this force religion. Sometimes, we invest it with an independent focus of action which we call God.”
“Psi focus!” Orne blurted. “Emolirdo implied I might be ... well, he said …”
“A god?” the Abbod asked.
Orne saw the old man’s hands trembling like leaves on the bedcovers. The prescient fear was gone, but he didn’t think he enjoyed the surge of internal forces that remained.
“That’s what he said,” Orne agreed.
“We have learned,” the Abbod said, “That a god without discipline faces the same fate in our dimensions as the merest human confronted with the same circumstances. It is unfortunate that humankind has always been so attracted to absolutes—even in our gods.”
Orne recalled his experience with Bakrish on the hillside, the mob, the psi forces surging from that massed organism of humanity.
The Abbod said: “You speak with a certain glibness of eternity, of absolutes. Let us turn to finite existence instead. Let us consider a finite system in which a given being—even a god—might exhaust all avenues of knowledge, and know everything, as it were.”
Orne saw the image painted by the Abbod’s words, blurted: “It’d be worse than death!”
“An unutterable and deadly boredom would face such a being,” the Abbod agreed. “The future would be an endless repetition, the replaying of all its old records. It would be, as you say, a boredom worse than extinction.”
“But boredom’s a kind of stasis,” Orne said. “That’d break down somewhere and explode into chaos.”
“And where do we poor finite creatures make our existence?” the Abbod asked.
“Surrounded by chaos,” Orne said.
“Immersed in it,” the Abbod said, his old eyelids fluttering. “We live in an infinite system where anything can happen, a place of constant change. Our one absolute: Things change.”
“If anything can happen,” Orne said, “your hypothetical being could be extinguished. Even a god?”
“Quite a price to pay to escape boredom, eh?” the Abbod asked.
“It can’t be that simple,” Orne protested.
“And probably isn’t,” the Abbod agreed. “Another consciousness exists within us which denies extinction. It has been called such things as collective unconscious, the paramatman, Urgrund, Sanatana Dharma, supermind, ober palliat. It has been called many things.”
“Words again,” Orne objected. “The fact that a name exists for something doesn’t mean that thing exists.”
“Good,” the Abbod said. “You do not mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning. You are an empiricist. Have you ever heard the legend of Doubting Thomas?”
“No.”
“Ahhh,” the Abbod said, “Then a mortal may instruct a god. Thomas is one of my favorite characters. He refused to take crucial facts on faith.”
“He sounds like a wise man.”
“I have always so considered him,” the Abbod said. “He questioned, but he failed to question far enough. Thomas never asked whom the gods worship.”
Orne felt his inner being turned over—one slow revolution. He sensed forces falling into place, concepts, order, chaos, new relationships. It was an explosion of awareness, a blinding light that illuminated infinity for him.
When it passed, he said: “You did not instruct Mahmud.”
“We did not,” the Abbod said, his voice low and sad. “Mahmud escaped us. We may
generate gods ... prophets, but we are not always in a healthy relationship with them. When they point out the pathways to degeneracy and failure, we may not listen. When they indicate the way out of our blindness, veils fall upon our sight. The results are ever the same.”
Orne spoke, hearing his own voice echo with a terrible resonance in the Abbod’s room: “And even when you follow the way, you achieve only temporary order. You climb toward power and fall into shattering circumstances.”
An inner light glowed from the Abbod’s glossy eyes. He said: “I pray to you, Orne. Have you any count on the number of helpless innocents tortured and maimed in the name of religion during our bloody history?”
“The number is meaningless,” Orne said.
“Why do religions run wild?” the Abbod asked.
“Do you know what happened to me out there tonight?” Orne demanded.
“I knew within minutes of your escape,” the Abbod said. “I pray you not to be angry. Remember, I am the one who summoned you.”
Orne stared at the Abbod, seeing not the flesh but the forces which came to focus there as though pouring through a torn place in a black curtain. “You wanted me to experience and learn the explosive energy within religion,” he said. “Truly, a mortal may instruct a god.” He hesitated. “Or a prophet. You please me, Abbod Hahnyrach.”
Tears poured from the Abbod’s eyes. He said: “Which are you, Orne: god or prophet?”
Orne silenced sensory perception, examined the new relationships, then: “Either, or both ... or none of these. One has a choice. I accept your challenge. I will not start a wild new religion.”
“Then what will you do?” the Abbod whispered.
Orne turned, waved a hand. A dancing sword of flame came into being about two meters from his outstretched hand. He aimed its point at the Abbod’s head, saw fear glisten in the old eyes.
“What happened to the first lonely human who tapped this form of energy?” Orne demanded.
“He was burned alive for sorcery,” the Abbod husked. “He did not know how to use the force after calling it into existence.”
“Then it is dangerous to call a force into existence without knowing how to use it,” Orne said. “Do you know what this particular force was called?”
“A salamander,” the Abbod whispered.
“Men thought it was a demon with a life of its own,” Orne said. “But you know more about it than that, don’t you, Reverend Abbod?”
“It’s raw energy,” the Abbod whispered. He drew in a ragged breath, sank back against his pillows.
Orne observed the lapse, infused the Abbod with additional energy.
“Thank you,” the Abbod said. “Sometimes I forget my years, but they do not forget me.”
“You forced me to accept the things I already could do,” Orne said. “I doubted the existence of a superior consciousness which sometimes manifests itself in men, in gods, prophets and machines. But you gave me the test of faith and forced me to have faith in myself.”
“It is thus gods are made,” the Abbod ventured.
Orne recalled the old nightmare—“Gods are made, not born.”
He said: “You should have listened to Thomas. Gods do worship. I summoned Mahmud and Mahmud was not of your making. I caused pain and suffering. In an infinite universe, a god may hate,”
The old man put his hands over his face, moaned: “Ohhh, what have we done? What have we done?”
Orne said: “Psi must be faced with psi.”
By willing it, Orne projected himself into space and alternate dimensions, found a place where psi forces did not distract. Somewhere, there was a great howling of non-sound, but he could ignore it. The thought of blazing seconds ticked within him. TIME!
He juggled symbols like blocks of energy, manipulated energy like discrete signals.
Time and tension: Tension equals energy source. Energy plus opposition equals growth of energy.
To strengthen a thing, oppose it. Growth of energy plus opposition produces (time/time) produces new identities.
Orne whispered soundlessly to TIME. “You become like the worst in what you oppose.”
TIME displayed it for him: The great degenerated into the small, priest slipped into evil ...
Somewhere beyond him, Orne sensed chaotic energy flowing. It was a great blankness filled with ceaseless flowing. He felt himself on a mountaintop and there was a mountaintop beneath him. He pressed the living earth with flattened palms.
Thus I have shape, he thought.
A voice came to him from below the mountain. He was being pulled down the mountain, distorted, twisted. Orne resisted the distortion, allowed himself to flow toward the voice. “Blessed is Orne; blessed is Orne …”
It was a persistent chant in the Abbod’s voice. There were others then—Diana, Stetson ... a multitude.
“Blessed is Orne ...”
Orne saw with senses he created for the purpose, and into dimensions of his own making. Still, he sensed the flowing chaos, knowing that even this might not hold him. One had only to make the proper perception. Veils would fall away.
“Blessed is Orne,” the Abbod prayed.
Orne felt a pang of sympathy for the old man, recognized the awe. It was like Emolirdo’s aborted demonstration—a three-dimensional shadow cast into a two-dimensional universe. The Abbod existed in a thin layer of time. Life projected the Abbod’s matter along that thin dimension.
The Abbod prayed to his God Orne and Orne answered, coming down from the mountaintop, erasing the worship of the multitudes, coming to rest as a physical form cross-legged and seated upon the bed.
“Once again you summon me,” Orne said.
“You have not said which you choose,” the Abbod said. “God, prophet ... or what?”
“It’s interesting,” Orne said. “You exist within these dimensions, yet outside them. I have seen your thoughts blaze through a lifetime, taking only a second for the journey. When you are threatened, your awareness retreats into no-time; you force time almost to a standstill.”
The Abbod still sat propped up in bed, but now he held his hands extended prayerfully. He said: “I pray that you answer my question.”
“You already know the answer,” Orne said.
“I?” the Abbod’s eyes opened wide in surprise. The thin old shanks trembled in the bed.
“You have known it for thousands of years,” Orne said. “I have seen this. Before men first ventured into space, some were looking at the universe in the right way and learning to answer such questions. They called it Maya. The tongue was called Sanskrit.”
“Maya,” the Abbod whispered. “I project my consciousness upon the universe.”
“Life creates its own motive,” Orne said. “We project our own reason for being. And always ahead of us—the great cataclysm and the great awakening. Always ahead of us—the great burning time from which the phoenix arises. The faith we have is the faith we create.”
“How does that answer my question?” the Abbod pleaded.
“I choose that which any god would choose,” Orne said.
And he disappeared from the Abbod’s bedroom.
***
Chapter Thirty
As Orne indicated, the prophet who calls forth the dead actually returns the body’s matter to a time when it was alive. The man who walks from planet to planet sees time as a specific location; without time to stretch across it, there is no space. Orne has created our universe as an expanding balloon of irregular dimensions. Thus he accepted my challenge and answered my prayer. We can continue staring at our universe through the symbol-grids which we construct. We can continue reading our universe like an old man with his nose pressed against the page.
—Private report of the ABBOD HALMYRACH
In his Marak office, Tyler Gemine, director of R&R, faced his visitor across an immense blackwood desk. The desk smelled of perfumed polish. Its wide top held a holographic projection of Gemine’s family and a communications console.
Behind Gemine, a simulwindow looked out across the pyramid steps of Marak’s Government Central, a descending line of parks and angular structures glistening under the green light of noon sun. The director was a rounded outline against the simulwindow, a fat and genial surface with smiling mouth and hard eyes. Frown wrinkles creased his forehead.
“Let me get this clear, Admiral Stetson,” Gemine said. “You’re telling me that Orne appeared in your office out of nowhere?”
Stetson slouched in the shaping chair across from Gemine, eyes almost level with the desktop. It interested him that the polished surface of the desk created an illusion of heat waves which danced across Gemine’s chest.
“That’s what I’m telling you, sir,” Stetson said.
“Like that fellow from Wessen, you mean? A psi thing?”
“Call it whatever you want, sir: Orne just popped out of nowhere, grinned at me and delivered that message.”
“I don’t find this flattering at all,” Gemine protested. His hard eyes bored into Stetson.
Stetson hid amusement under a mask of concern. “Well, sir, there are a lot of us from I-A who need jobs now that you’ve taken over our work.”
“I understand that,” Gemine said, his gaze cold and measuring. “But I resent, I deeply resent the suggestion that R&R has been making dangerous mistakes …”
“There was that unfortunate business on Hamal, sir,” Stetson said, “Not to mention Gienah and …”
“I am not suggesting we’re perfect, Admiral,” Gemine said. “But our positions now remain pretty clear. The vote in the Assembly was decisive. The I-A is no more and we are …”
“Nothing’s really decisive in a final sense, sir,” Stetson said. “You’d better, ahhh, kind of go through once more what Orne is saying in that message.”
“His message is plain enough,” Gemine said. “And I must say it sounds rather far-fetched to suggest that I should take this on faith and ... I say, isn’t it getting rather hot in here?” Gemine ran a finger around his collar.
Without shifting his body, Stetson pointed to the region above Gemine’s left ear. The R&R director turned, eyes going wide as his gaze encountered a dancing point of flame hanging in the air. Burning, prickling sensations crawled along his skin.