The Race for God (19 page)

Startled, Orbust lost hold of the Snapcard, which he had been bending slightly. The card sprang toward Zatima, falling to the deck beside her. Nanak Singh, her constant companion, placed one foot over it.

Appy went on the offensive: “These averages, these composites, are from the contributions of many people. Everyone involved will see a vague familiarity in all ships, and only one slightly more specific familiarity in one ship. It’s subliminal, and, like magnets, all present were drawn by televid images to this ship.”

“You’re an awfully noisy computer on a ship that wants quiet,” Orbust said. He took half a step toward Singh, seemed to be measuring the strength and determination of his adversary Orbust’s eyelid fluttered wildly, forcing him to close that eye. A throbbing vein on his forehead became apparent, and his features tightened angrily.

“Shusher doesn’t hear me,” Appy said. “Unless I go on a special comlink at his frequency. He can’t hear the vibratory exchange between me and humans. Ah yes, the off-limits signs. Which of you went where you weren’t supposed to go?”

McMurtrey and Corona exchanged uneasy glances.

He doesn’t know?
McMurtrey thought.

“Not talking, eh?” Appy said. “All right, we’ll deal with that later. Fair warning: The area is booby-trapped.”

“He’s lying,” Corona whispered. “Either that or the traps didn’t work.”

“Why doesn’t he know it’s you?” McMurtrey whispered.
“Sometimes he acts like he sees us, though I haven’t noticed any cameras.”

Corona shrugged. “Who knows?”

“Anyway, you’d think the comlinks to God or Shusher would report such data.”

“Yeah, you’d think so.”

McMurtrey had been watching Orbust, Zatima and Singh. These three were locked in a staring contest and a little dance in which their bodies made subtle shifts that an observer could only see with close attention—Orbust inching toward the ParKekh foot that covered his Snapcard, the ParKekh’s hand near his scabbard, Zatima sliding between the two men as if to keep them from violence.

Thus far, Orbust showed no indication of employing his gun to enforce his desires, but the situation looked volatile. He had only one eye open, and his words were suffused with rage. “You believe in reincarnation, don’t you, ParKekh?”

Singh nodded warily.

“And in that belief system, a person who does not lead a proper life can be reincarnated as a lowly animal, even as a frog?”

“You will reincarnate even lower,” Singh snapped.

“And in turn, if the frog does not lead a proper life, it will reincarnate as something less?”

The ParKekh glowered.

“Tell me,” Orbust said, glancing at his Snapcard under the bearded holy man’s sandal, “what are the criteria for being a good frog? It’s easy to see that your belief in spiritual recycling is misguided.”

The ParKekh looked nonplussed.

McMurtrey noticed that Orbust was doing fairly well in this debate without his card, and that Singh didn’t seem to be aided by it. Maybe a person had to have direct skin contact with the card, or it only worked for Orbust.

“There are ways of being a good frog,” Zatima interjected. “One must be a frog to know them.”

“Can’t he speak for himself?” Orbust said.

“‘O my Lord, who can comprehend Thy excellence?’” the ParKekh intoned. “‘None can recount my sinfulness. Many times I was born as a tree, many times as an animal, and many times I came in the form of a snake and many times I flew as a bird: . . .’”

Suddenly, Orbust shoved Zatima out of the way and lunged toward his Snapcard, without drawing his gun.

The ParKekh holy man was a fighting machine, with a frightening array of lethal kicks, elbow shots, backhand moves and whirling explosions of power. Orbust took blows to each upper arm, and the cracking impact of bone on bone made those appendages useless. His legs went next, and he crumpled to the deck, receiving at least two blows in the face as he went down. Orbust writhed on the deck and twitched involuntarily about the head and neck as if he had damage to his nervous system. The brow over one of his eyes bled profusely, and he was unable to bring a hand to cover it.

Singh leaned over and removed Orbust’s belt and holster.

“We will hold this weapon,” Zatima said, “until a proper judge has been selected to decide upon its disposition. You are not fit to carry it.”

Unnoticed by her or by the ParKekh, Orbust’s chemstrip fell out of the holster, to the floor. The chemstrip was visible to McMurtrey for only seconds, when the bottom of a broom darted out from the crowd and then back. It was a lightning stroke, and when complete the chemstrip was nowhere to be seen. The Snapcard wasn’t visible, either.

McMurtrey saw Jin in the throng, moving away from the center of attention.

Why does Jin want those things? It had to be him . . . the broom . . .

McMurtrey hurried toward Orbust to help him.

“My card,” Orbust gasped. “Where’s my card?”

“Does anyone see that card he was holding?” a man asked. No one responded.

“Uhhhh, aaah!” Orbust groaned. “I need a doctor!”

McMurtrey pushed his way through, knelt by Orbust and dabbed around his eye with a handkerchief. The eye didn’t look too bad, but the brow was badly split, dripping blood into the eye. He stopped the flow.

Sister Mary and her companion Sister Agatha got through, and the latter cradled Orbust’s head. He wasn’t twitching anymore, but had a terrible grimace on his face.

Archbishop Perrier shouted for Appy to send medical aid.

“Is there a doctor aboard?” McMurtrey asked.

“Processing data,” Appy reported. “Cannot locate infirmary or assigned attendants . . . all was in order at departure . . . processing . . . I don’t think we jettisoned anything like that . . . Shusher, did you? . . . Oh, here it is . . . an infirmary with no attendants . . . not my fault . . . ”

“Hang who’s at fault!” McMurtrey shouted. “Just get us some aid, pronto!”

“Sister Agatha and I are nurses,” Sister Mary said, “but we need supplies and a facility where we can handle the injuries.” She chewed at her lip, looked around.

McMurtrey was perspiring at the brow, guessed that the close gathering of people was absorbing available oxygen. He asked them to move back, and most cooperated.

“Oh, there you are!” Appy exclaimed. “Sister Mary and Sister Agatha are the attendants! Weren’t you informed?”

Sister Mary shook her head, looked blankly at her companion and said, “No. We were just asked to be here, without explanation.”

“‘Well, it was adequately explained to your bishop,” Appy
claimed.

Invited for particular tasks,
McMurtrey thought.
Like
Corona, they must not have participated in the visual assembly of this ship.

“Why aren’t you on duty?” the computer demanded. “You think this is a party ship, with no work to do?”

“We’d be happy to report” Sister Mary said, with more than a hint of irritation, “if we knew where to go.”

“Why didn’t you ask? You think you can just show up and have everything laid out for you?”

It’s Appy’s fault,
McMurtrey thought, judging from the intensity with which the computer was attempting to distance itself from culpability. This suggested a stern taskmaster above, one who didn’t coddle subordinates.

“I showed up for work, Appy!” Corona yelled, from a short distance away. “You took my captaincy, gave me the runaround, broke your word! Now you’re chastising these gentle ladies for something they had nothing to do with? What kind of a crazy operation is this?”

“Make yourself useful, Corona,” came the response. “Take these nurses and their patient to the infirmary. Level Sixteen, Corridor Two, the little room on the left with the caduceus on the door.”

“All egress blocked,” Corona said, “as we’ve been telling you. Is your brain blocked, too?”

“Get over to the patient, Corona! Now! Then I’ll, lead you by the hand, since that seems necessary.”

Corona emerged from the crowd and went to McMurtrey’s side. Her forehead was creased in anger.

“Out of the way, McMurtrey!” Appy commanded. “You’re slowing things down!”

“Don’t jump on me! I was just—” McMurtrey stood up and moved aside.

Corona, the nuns and Orbust disappeared into the deck, just as the chairs had done in their assembly room.

“Magic!” a woman exclaimed.

“The work of the Devil,” offered another.

“No need to worry,” Appy said, with sudden cheer, “S.O.P.”

“Standard Operating Procedure,” a man said.

“Oh shut up,” another man said. “You think we’re a bunch of dodos?”

Soon we’ll hear the hiss of gas,
McMurtrey thought. But this thought humored him only slightly.

McMurtrey experienced a wave of concern for Corona. This computer/ship combination was not operating at peak efficiency. Could Corona and the others have been jettisoned accidentally?

The air in the corridor was stale, and several of the women complained of this.

“Not to worry,” Appy said. “The ventilation will be operating presently. We haven’t lost a passenger yet!”

That might bode well for Corona, and McMurtrey was about to ask for confirmation, when several pilgrims shouted that the corridor was open.

McMurtrey became one with those around him, and like a segmented creature with a single brain, they rushed through doors that before had been closed.

Just before he left the corridor, McMurtrey glanced over his shoulder and saw Room B-3 open, with more confinees pouring into the rear of McMurtrey’s throng. Miraculously, no one was trampled.

Since no one had ordered him back to his cabin, McMurtrey took this opportunity to explore the ship.

It was like the Shusher of old but off a bit as if dream-distorted, reshaped in ways McMurtrey couldn’t discern. He hadn’t been aboard that long; it was only the middle of the first day according to his D’Urth-oriented Wriskron. His visual memory often gave him problems, but the vessel seemed tighter and smaller, tracking with Appy’s comments. And while it didn’t seem to be stem-to-stern shorter (determined by looking up the airspace between mezzanines), it seemed to be of lesser girth. The airspace was narrower in diameter, and the curving partitions as well, and McMurtrey heard numerous people complaining about changed cabin numbers.

The walls of some corridors boasted portholes in varying sizes, shapes and configurations. They appeared to be laid out randomly, and when McMurtrey had his bearings he confirmed that the window wall of Assembly Room B-2 faced aft on the ship. So mirrors and prisms must have been employed to view forward from that area, just as Corona had theorized.

By peering through portholes, McMurtrey determined that the white lines remained outside and a good distance ahead of the ship. Behind, he saw only distant stars, not even the backside of the blue and purple nebula he presumed they had passed through.

On Level 12, McMurtrey passed a black door that was ajar. He heard angry words coming through the opening, pushed the door open.

The room was turgid with religious paraphernalia piled to the ceiling in bright red and yellow wire shelf-baskets. A number of aisles divided the area, giving it the packed arrangement of a remote general store.

Partway down one aisle, a Nandu outcast and a Hoddhist were toe-to-toe, nose-to-nose. The outcast, who wore a white cotton dhoti, held a wooden alms bowl tightly in one upraised hand, and from the man’s hostile demeanor he appeared close to crowning the other fellow with the bowl.

“That’s a Hoddhist bowl!” his adversary insisted, reaching for the bowl. But the outcast, who was taller, held it just out of reach.

Down another aisle, a man in a black robe clattered through a pile of candelabras that were heaped loosely in a tall wire bin. “Damned cheap shit!” he snapped. Ferociously, he grabbed a handful of candles from an adjacent bin, and stalked toward the doorway.

McMurtrey moved out of the way.

“These will have to do,” the man with the candles said.

McMurtrey returned to the cabin assignment dispenser, where people were having their identifications rescanned and new cabin numbers assigned. He went through the process again, found that he had the same berth assignment as before, the “satanic” three sixes: Level 6, Number 66.

He recalled Appy’s suggestion that he, Evander Harold McMurtrey, might be “the Beast,” might even be the Devil himself. No one had confronted McMurtrey on this or even suggested it to his face except Appy. But Appy had claimed that persons aboard were talking about it.

He recalled Corona’s warning too: that someone might kill him over this. But he felt no fear, and this surprised him, for he had never considered himself to be particularly brave.

Kelly Corona retained her previous cabin assignment, as McMurtrey discovered when he encountered her on Level 6 moments later. They theorized that this may have occurred in part because they were on the inner aisle, by the railing. But all around they saw evidence of altered assignments—spaces occupied where they had been empty before, and familiar faces either in different spots or not apparent at all. Jin was directly adjacent to McMurtrey now, whereas previously he had been four spaces away. Zatima and Singh were on the other side of Jin, still adjacent.

Corona’s cubicle was open, bed down, and she was lying on the bed looking at the book-tape screen on the headboard, touching the control bar to scroll the listings.

McMurtrey mustered his courage, stomped into her space and knelt on the deck beside her. She had a number of book-tape titles locked in on the screen. Every one had to do with sex.

“Now look here!” McMurtrey said, in a low, urgent tone. “You and I are going to have it out! I—I don’t know how to handle the things you’ve been saying. You’re—you’re sexually harassing me!”

“Your eyes harassed me,” she said calmly, without looking at him. “They harassed my breasts!”

McMurtrey sighed. He gazed at people on an upper mezzanine level. She said I could, didn’t she, that if she hadn’t wanted me to, she would have worn a barrel? No use arguing with her . . .

“You enjoyed staring at them, didn’t you?”

“I told you, I hardly knew I was doing it. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe I was daydreaming.”