Beyond the Rift (16 page)

God is telling me,
Have strength. I am with you
.

My fear recedes like an ebbing tide. I turn back to my escorts and smile; God is with them too, if they’d only realize it.

But I don’t believe they do. Something changes in their faces when they look at me. The last time I turned to face them, they were merely grim and uncooperative.

Now, for some reason, they almost look afraid.

They take me to the temple, but not to the bishop. They send me through the tunnel of light instead. They tell me it is entirely routine, although I went through the tunnel only four months ago and am not due again for another eight.

My armor is not returned to me afterwards. Instead, they escort me into the bishop’s sanctum, through an ornate doorway embellished with the likeness of a fiery cross and God’s commandment to Constantine:
In hoc signo vinces
. In this sign, conquer.

They leave me alone, but I know the procedure. There are guards outside.

The sanctum is dark and comforting, all cushions and velvet drapes and mahogany bones. There are no windows. A screen on one wall glows with a succession of volumetric images. Each lingers for a few moments before dissolving hypnotically into the next: the Sinai foothills; Prolinius leading the charge against the Hindus; the Holy Grotto itself, where God showed Moses the Burning Bush, where He showed all of us the way of the Spirit.

“Imagine that we had never found it.”

I turn to find the bishop standing behind me as if freshly materialized. He holds a large envelope the color of ivory. He watches me with the faintest trace of a smile on his lips.

“Teacher?” I say.

“Imagine that Constantine never had his vision, that Eusebius never sent his expedition into Sinai. Imagine that the Grotto had never been rediscovered after Moses. No thousand-year legacy, no technological renaissance. Just another unprovable legend about a prophet hallucinating in the mountains, and ten commandments handed down with no tools to enforce them. We’d be no better than the heathens.”

He gestures me towards a settee, a decadent thing, overstuffed and wine-colored. I do not wish to sit, but neither do I wish to give offense. I perch carefully on one edge.

The bishop remains standing. “I’ve been there, you know,” he continues. “In the very heart of the Grotto. Kneeling in the very place Moses Himself must have knelt.”

He’s waiting for a response. I clear my throat. “It must have been...indescribable.”

“Not really.” He shrugs. “You probably feel closer to God during your morning devotionals. It’s...unrefined, after all. Raw ore. Astounding enough that a natural formation could induce
any
kind of religious response, much less one consistent enough to base a culture on. Still, the effect is...weaker than you might expect. Overrated.”

I swallow and hold my tongue.

“Of course, you could say the same thing about the religious experience in principal,” he continues, blandly sacrilegious. “Just an electrical hiccough in the temporal lobe, no more
divine
than the force that turns compass needles and draws iron filings to a magnet.”

I remember the first time I heard such words: with the rest of my crèche, just before our first Communion.
It’s like a magic trick,
they said.
Like static interfering with a radio. It confuses the part of your brain that keeps track of your edges, of where you
stop
and everything else
begins
—and when that part gets confused, it thinks you go on
forever
, that you and creation are one. It tricks you into believing you’re in the very presence of God.
They showed us a picture of the brain sitting like a great wrinkled prune within the shadowy outline of a human head, arrows and labels drawing our attention to the relevant parts. They opened up wands and prayer caps to reveal the tiny magnets and solenoids inside, all the subtle instrumentality that had subverted an entire race.

Not all of us got it at first. When you’re a child,
electromagnet
is just another word for
miracle
. But they were patient, repeating the essentials in words simple enough for young minds, until we’d all grasped the essential point: we were but soft machines, and God was a malfunction.

And then they put the prayer caps on our heads and opened us to the Spirit and we knew, beyond any doubting, that God was real. The experience transcended debate, transcended logic. There was no room for argument. We
knew
. Everything else was just words.

Remember
, they said afterwards.
When the heathens would tell you our God is a lie, remember this moment
.

I cannot believe that the bishop is playing the same games with me now. If he is joking, it is in very bad taste. If he is testing my conviction he falls laughably short. Neither alternative explains my presence here.

But he won’t take silence for an answer: “Don’t you agree?” he presses.

I tread carefully. “I was taught that the Spirit lives within iron filings and compass needles as much as in our minds and our hearts. That makes it no less Divine.” I take a breath. “I mean no disrespect, Teacher, but why am I here?”

He glances at the envelope in his hand. “I wished to discuss your recent...exemplary performance.”

I wait, not taken in. My guards did not treat me as an
exemplary
performer.

“You,” he continues, “are why we prevail against the heathens. It’s not just the technology that the Spirit provides, it’s the
certainty
. We
know
our God. He is empirical, He can be tested and proven and experienced. We have no doubt.
You
have no doubt. That is why we have been unstoppable for a thousand years, that is why neither Backland spies nor heathen flying machines nor the very breadth of an ocean will keep us from victory.”

They are not words that need corroboration.

“Imagine what it must be like to have to
believe
.” The bishop shakes his head, almost sadly. “Imagine the doubt, the uncertainty, the discord and petty strife over which dreams are divine and which are blasphemous. Sometimes I almost pity the heathens. What a terrible thing it must be, to need
faith
. And yet they cling to it. They creep into our towns and they wear our clothes and they move among us, and they
shield
themselves from the very presence of God.” He sighs. “I confess I do not entirely understand them.”

“They ingest some sort of herb or fungus,” I tell him. “They claim it connects them with their own
god
.”

The bishop
mmmm
s. Doubtless he knew this already. “I would like to see their
fungus
move a monorail. Or even turn a compass needle. And yet, surrounded by evidence of the Lord’s hand, they continue to cut themselves off from it. This is not widely known, but we’ve received reports that they can successfully scramble entire rooms. Whole villas, even.”

He runs one long fingernail along the envelope, slitting it lengthwise.

“Like the chapel you purged this morning, Praetor. It was scrambled. The Spirit could not manifest.”

I shake my head. “You are mistaken, Teacher. I’ve never felt the Spirit more strongly than—”

The grim-faced escorts. The detour through Golgotha. The shaft of inexplicable sunlight. Everything falls into place.

A yawning chasm opens in the pit of my stomach.

The bishop extracts a sheet of film from the envelope: a snapshot of my passage through the Tunnel of Light. “You are possessed,” he says.

No. There is some mistake.

He holds up the snapshot, a ghostly, translucent image of my head rendered in grays and greens. I can see the demon clearly. It festers within my skull, a malign little lump of darkness just above my right ear. A perfect spot from which to whisper lies and treachery.

I am unarmed. I am imprisoned: I will not leave this place a free man. There are guards beyond the door, and unseen priestholes hidden in the dark corners of the room. If I so much as raise a hand to the bishop I am dead.

I am dead anyway. I am possessed.

“No,” I whisper.

“I am the way, the truth, and the light,”
the bishop intones.
“None can come to the Father except through me
.
”
He stabs at the lump on the plate with one accusing finger. “Is
this
of the Christ? Is it of His Church? How then can it be real?”

I shake my head, dumbly. I cannot believe this is happening. I cannot believe what I see. I felt the Spirit today. I
felt
it. I am as certain of that as I have been of anything.

Is it me thinking these thoughts? Is it the demon, whispering to me?

“It seems there are more of them every day,” the bishop remarks sadly. “And they are not content to corrupt the soul. They kill the body as well.”

They force the
Church
to kill the body, he means. The Church is going to kill me.

But the bishop shakes his head, as though reading my mind. “I speak literally, Praetor. The demon will take your life. Not immediately—it may seduce you with this false rapture for some time. But then you will feel pain, and your mind will go. You will change; not even your loved ones will recognize you by your acts. Perhaps, near the end, you will become a drooling infant, squalling and soiling yourself. Or perhaps the pain will simply grow unbearable. Either way, you will die.”

“How—how long?”

“A few days, a few weeks...I know of one poor soul who was ridden for nearly a year before she was saved.”

Saved. Like the heretics at Golgotha.

And yet
, whispers a tiny inner voice,
even a few days spent in that Presence would be easily worth a lifetime...

I bring my hand to my temple. The demon lurks in there, festering in wet darkness only a skull’s thickness away. I stare at the floor. “It can’t be.”

“It is. But it does not
have
to be.”

It takes me a moment to realize what he’s just said. I look up and meet his eyes.

He’s smiling. “There is another way,” he says. “Yes, usually the body must die that the soul can be saved—crucifixion is infinitely kinder than the fate that usually awaits the possessed. But there’s an alternative, for those with—potential. I will not mislead you, Praetor. There are risks. But there have been successes as well."

“An...an alternative...?”

“We may be able to exorcise the demon. We may be able to
remove
it, physically, from your head. If it works we can both save your life and return you to the Lord’s presence.”

“If it works...”

“You are a soldier. You know that death is always a possibility. It is a risk here, as in all things.” He takes a deep, considered breath. “On the cross, death would be a certainty.”

The demon in my head does not argue. It whispers no blasphemies, makes no desperate plea against the prospect of its extraction. It merely opens the door to Heaven a crack, and bathes my soul in a sliver of the Divine.

It shows me the Truth.

I
know
, as I knew in the crèche, as I knew this morning. I am in the presence of God, and if the bishop cannot see it then the bishop is a babbling charlatan, or worse.

I would gladly go to the cross for just such a moment as this.

I smile and shake my head. “Do you think me
blind
, Bishop? You would wrap your wretched plottings up in Scripture, that I would not see them for what they are?” And I
do
see them now, laid bare in the Spirit’s radiance. Of course these vile Pharisees would trap the Lord in trinkets and talismans if they could. They would ration God through a spigot to which only they have access—and those to whom He would speak without their consent, they would brand
possessed
.

And I
am
possessed, but not by any demon. I am possessed by Almighty God. And neither He nor His Sons are hermit crabs, driven to take up residence in the shells of idols and machinery.

“Tell me, Bishop,” I cry. “Was Saul wearing one of your
prayer caps
on the road to Damascus? Did Elisha summon his bears with one of your wands? Or were
they
possessed of demons as well?”