The Race for God (5 page)

There were four Dispatchers including Gutan, and the general routine was one month on duty and two months off, with allowances for sick pay. Most of the time Gutan ended up flying home to Ciscola from all over the country, then flying to meet the mnemonic machine wherever it ended up two months later.

Gutan’s first work experience had been as an embalming technician in his father’s mortuary. After Gutan spent fifteen years there, a scandal over gold and silver fillings that were missing from cadavers forced the firm into bankruptcy. There were also rumors of corneas and other body parts sold illegally to hospitals, but all of it, while true, went unproven by authorities.

A long period of blacklisting and destitution ensued, in which Gutan bounced between a variety of minimum-wage jobs. Finally he landed a worthwhile position with the government in the Body Disposal Corps. Through a series of staff and management shakeups this led him to the Dispatch Division of the League Penitentiary System.

Initially Gutan worked with what the prison system called “Damoclean boxes,” giant one-to-a-prisoner cages, with a ten-ton weight suspended from the ceiling of each cage. Through remarkable gearing and engineering, the weight was held by but a single cutaway strand of the prisoner’s own hair. If remained but for the Dispatcher to slice the hair, a simple task.; When the Mnemo position became available, Gutan took a skills test and was selected as one of the elite crew to operate the machine.

For this assignment Gutan was trained differently, through a job computer chip implanted in his brain. As a consequence, Gutan wondered why any testing had been necessary; unless the job chip worked from a platform of skills already present in the individual.

The opium permitted Gutan to look at himself objectively, as from afar, and in one facet of this he could study the implanted chip as if he were an outside observer, without having to remove it and subject it to electronic analysis. He perused it occasionally for diversion, and found within the chip some of the documentation left by the professor.

Anytime Gutan wanted to do so, he could call internally upon all the data in the chip for review. It was a conscious subconscious experience, since with the extent and method of training he didn’t need to think about his tasks. He wondered if he was learning unauthorized information in this process.

The laboratory-type control methods utilized in the executions, for example, became very apparent upon analysis—the way each condemned prisoner was dispatched with different machine settings, with data fed constantly into an adjacent and sealed government-installed computer.

Gutan watched Fork place the big woman in the mnemonic machine and strap her into the seat.

Working with uncharacteristic slowness, Fork unhooked a spray unit from a bracket on an inside wall, pointed the unit at the woman and pulled a long trigger. Clear electropulmonary gel inundated her naked body, covering even her mouth and nose. The stuff gave her body a sweaty sheen and blocked her breathing, causing her face to turn red for several seconds. It made her eyes red as well, and as Gutan had been taught, temporarily distorted vision without permanent harm. As if it mattered.

A strawberry odor from the gel filled his nostrils, excited him. He used the substance left on bodies as a sexual lubricant.

Fork clamped a strand of red plazymer tubing from the machine to a gel-covered spot on her neck, and she resumed breathing. Her coloration returned to near normal, but she couldn’t conceal agitation, manifested in little muscular twitches all over her body.

After a few seconds, convex bubbles formed in front of her eyes, giving her face an alien cast. These bubbles were as clear as those of eyeglass lenses, enabling the dispatchee and the Dispatcher to look at one another.

Fear had set into her eyes, and this intrigued Gutan. He always enjoyed watching the eyes.

Soon the woman would scream and her face would become horribly distorted, like all the other dispatchees. Then she would be Gutan’s for a time, to have his way with her.

Someone was assimilating data from Mnemo, correlating the different settings with variations in the dispatchees’ vital signs and in the times of death. The subjects were being wrenched back in their memories to prior lives, according to Gutan’s implanted job chip. He had seen incredible images flash across the LCD screen, scenes resembling those in history books, with images that focused only briefly and sometimes not at all, then blurred and provided glimpses of still earlier times, in various societies. As the images spun into antiquity, they were like a film on uncontrolled rewind, skipping onto prior films, separate films. It shouldn’t have been possible.

At times with the mnemonic equipment Gutan thought he might be close to observing the whole history of mankind—in a mind-boggling amalgam one life might become every life, focusing ultimately in the distant, nearly erased past to explain the reason for everything.

Had Professor Pelter discovered what he had been looking for, the culmination of all his efforts? Did each inmate at death discover this priceless information, whatever it was? And if so, was that data transferable to living persons? It seemed obvious to Gutan that the government didn’t have all the answers, that dispatchings were conducted with Mnemo to learn more.

Professor Pelter went out with a head full of secrets.

Gutan didn’t know how many variables there were in machine settings, and this had to be factored in with the variables in human subjects. The possibilities had to be calculator-boggling. With just the right settings and just the right subject, maybe the memory trail, as it rocketed back, wouldn’t kill the subject.

He suspected with this thought that the monitors couldn’t control the speed of memory recapture, that the subjects needed more time to adjust to each setting before going back, before traversing lives. They were being overwhelmed.

Was one life every life?

Gutan had to laugh at these thoughts. An opium-saturated ex-mortician thinking about philosophy, about the meaning of life? If not for a couple of turns of fate, he might still be working in his family’s funeral parlor, just as so many Gutans had done for more than two centuries.

It seemed like only a short while ago that he had worked with his family, but it had been nearly three decades. What had happened to his life? When the family business slipped beneath the waves he felt a shock to his system, a shock to the chain of his bloodline, and in all the time since then he had not recovered.

He felt guilt for something he’d never discussed with his family or with those few friends he’d had over the years, friends who inevitably came no closer to him than acquaintances. Barriers. He always kept them up. Barriers protected him from discovery.

It was this terrible personal truth that kept him from wanting to see anyone in his family. He had a sister, two brothers, nephews and cousins somewhere, but would never see any of them again. Maybe they didn’t want to see him, anyway. Maybe they knew what went on in the shadows.

The opium helped Gutan deal with this, and thus far he hadn’t experienced the usual sleepiness or other adverse side effects. It wasn’t ordinary somniferous opium, according to the mail-order literature that came with it. Gutan had noticed a need for ever-increasing doses, however, in order to achieve the desired state of euphoria.

When Gutan was off duty he thought about being on duty, couldn’t wait to get back to work. Despite his shame, this work intrigued him, and he wanted to learn more about Mnemo than the iceberg tip he had seen so far.

He harbored no doubts that this project was big, far greater than a traveling execution machine. He sensed glimmerings of that truth and of a greater one beyond, like the glimmerings of the smile he thought he saw at times on Fork’s sheet-metal face.

McMurtrey hadn’t considered for an instant the possibility that he might freeze in front of a crowd. Never before had he spoken to large gatherings, but it occurred to him that a crowd might be easier to handle in one sense than an individual. With individuals he had this chronic, nagging tendency to be distracted by mannerisms. With a crowd, he assured himself, he wouldn’t focus on any individual. It would be a sea of sameness, and his thoughts would remain in line.

So with his chicken on his shoulder that sunny afternoon, McMurtrey went to the podium on the makeshift stage and faced the multitude.

They stood shoulder to shoulder and belly to backside as far as he could see—on the beaches, on the roads, on the rocky hillsides. Big black speakers had been placed everywhere so that all might hear.

The ocean was a cool pale blue, lapping relentlessly in shimmering wave armies at the shoreline, wearing the land away little by little, imperceptibly. McMurtrey, as he stood there listening to the waves and watching them, thought he heard the subtle raspings of shoreline erosion, and in his mind’s eye he tried to envision the great storms of history at this place—as if all were occurring at once in a tremendous blast of water, wind and sound.

Then the storms subsided and the people grew quiet, with the exception of a stooped woman in the front who waggled her fingers in the chicken beak ritual and sang out loudly:

“O Chubby Mother,

Let me rubba your belly . . .

Let me rubba your belly”

One of my followers
, McMurtrey thought.
God, she’s one of the stupid zealots!

McMurtrey touched his lips, asking for quiet.

He stood in afternoon sunlight telling the people he was a fraud. He told them everything, and it gushed forth in a torrent of phrases he hadn’t known he would use.

The woman in the front moaned that she didn’t believe it, and other solitary cries rang from the throng. It saddened McMurtrey that his words were like knives in the hearts of some, but he knew this had to be done, that ultimately it would be for the best.

When he had said everything, it seemed natural, comfortable, a confessional. He had purged his conscience, bared his tainted soul before all. He stood naked before them.

He saw tears in the audience among those of all denominations, most evidently among the pious, whom he could see glowing softly yellow when he squinted. Nowhere, not even among those who bore swords and other weapons on their hips, did he detect even the flickering of a sneer or any sort of unkind expression. This despite the fact that he stood before them with a fat chicken on his shoulder.

It should have been a mockery; they should have been hurling vegetables and fruit at him.

As they waited for him to speak further, he looked beyond the people on the highest hillside, to the sky. A small cloud was chasing a puffy fat one, and they traveled on a high wind. He heard the wind beyond the sea noise, beyond the whisperings of the crowd.

He looked back at them, and raised his voice to be heard above all the sounds crashing in his ears. His words boomed through the speakers:

“I’ve told you of my life, that I’ve wasted years, that I’ve been a charlatan, a liar. Now, like the boy who cried wolf, I’m asking you to believe me when I tell you that God has spoken to me.”

“Verily, it is so!” came a shout from the crowd. It was a man’s voice, deep and resonant.

“We believe you!” a teenage girl exclaimed. “Praise the Lord! Our ships have come!” She had a shiny, bronze-colored stunbow strapped to her back.

“Is anything too difficult for the Lord?’” a man called out, from just in front of the podium. He held an open Babul, and an electronic concordance pendant dangling from his neck flashed the scriptural reference in orange: NESI 18:14.

A bearded man in a black caftan stepped forward, holding his Kooraq high. It was a brown leather tome, with elegant, flowing script inscribed on the cover. The man’s lips barely moved, and a voice seemed to come not from him, but rather, as in the case of a ventriloquist, from the volume itself: “WE BELIEVE IN ALLAH, AND IN THAT WHICH HAS BEEN SENT DOWN ON US. . . . TO HIM WE SURRENDER!”

Then a Floriental man in a Wessornian business suit stepped forth with a long rolled scroll, identified himself as an Ota, and said, in a very high, clear voice: “THE WISE MAN NEVER STRIVES HIMSELF FOR THE GREAT, AND THEREBY THE GREAT IS ACHIEVED!’ WE DIDN’T CALL FOR THE SHIPS! WE DID NOT BUILD THEM! HAD WE SOUGHT THESE SHIPS, WE COULD NOT ENTER THEM, FOR THEY WOULD NOT EXIST.”

“I think he’s saying it’s okay to go,” a woman said, within earshot of McMurtrey. “Who cares what he says?” a man said. A few in the crowd chuckled, a rolling, gentle sound. Then other holy men and women stepped forward and spoke, with each giving reasons from their sacred scriptures why people should travel by ship to God’s domain far across the universe. No one spoke against the ships, not even a number of atheists who made their presence known. All agreed that it would be a great adventure, and that someone should embark upon it, although all present did not want to make the journey.

Generally, McMurtrey was impressed with the respect that each religion displayed for others. There were a few rude individuals in the gathering, but their choppy words of criticism toward other faiths fell as stones into a pit—unanswered—and these outcasts fell silent.

After waiting more patiently than he might have, McMurtrey wanted to continue his address. He asked the various representatives to yield to him.

They did so graciously, and McMurtrey spoke for a while longer.

Then he paused, and a current of assent swept all around, building to a crescendo of chanting: “PRAISE GOD AND McMURTREY! PRAISE GOD AND McMURTREY!”

McMurtrey saw the faces of many in the audience uplifted toward him, as if people were beholding divine light. To them, his words were God’s words.

McMurtrey spread his arms wide, gazed reverently at the sky.

But a solitary male voice rose from the multitude, to McMurtrey’s right. It cut through sanctified air like a razor on flesh, making McMurtrey shiver. But he was not cold. “Why you, Rooster?” the voice asked. “Why in the name of all that’s holy did God select you as His messenger?” As the man spoke, he pushed his way through the crowd. People let him past, and soon he stood on the bottom step of the stage, staring up defiantly at McMurtrey. “He has a gun!” someone shouted.