Coyote Rising (12 page)

Next morning, I packed up my gear, folded my tent, and bid a not-so-fond
farewell to
Long Journey
turf. The camp chief was surprised to see me go, but hardly choked up about it; he’d never liked me very much, and the feeling was mutual. He’d lose rent for a while, but a new ship had just arrived and eventually he’d find some poor bastard who’d want my space. The few friends I had there were surprised as well, and a couple of them tried to get me to tell them where I was headed, but I kept my mouth shut; I didn’t want anyone else horning in on the act. Jaime tried to follow me, but I sidetracked him by cutting through Trappers Guild turf. By the time he finished apologizing to them, I was on the dirt road leading to the edge of town.

The Universalists weren’t shocked when I reappeared; in fact, they were expecting me. Renaldo and Ernst took one look at the ragged tent I tried to pitch near their own and pronounced it to be uninhabitable; for then, I’d share quarters with them. Clarice wrinkled her nose when she saw my clothes; burn them, she said, they had plenty to spare. They didn’t have an extra sleeping bag, unfortunately, but Arthur relieved me of mine and took it away to be washed. And then everyone agreed that I smelled nearly as bad as the stuff I’d brought with me; before I had a chance to object, water had been boiled, tarps had been erected around
a collapsible washtub, and I was being treated to my first hot bath in so long that I’d forgotten what it was like. Nor did I have to do it alone; while Angela washed my feet, Doria rinsed my hair, and neither of them took offense at the embarrassing development that soon occurred between my legs.

I emerged from my bath feeling as clean as the day I was born, wearing clothes so fresh that they crinkled as I walked. And the treatment wasn’t over yet; while I was washing up, Greer made breakfast for me. It was light fare—a bowl of hot oatmeal, a couple of slices of fresh-baked bread, a cup of vegetable juice—but it was much better than what I had been eating for the last year. I ate sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of the fire pit; Greer sat at my side, silently watching as I wolfed everything down. I had to restrain myself from licking the bowl, and when I was done, I turned to her.

“That was the best”—I covered my mouth to stifle a belch—“breakfast I’ve had in years. Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. And thank you for coming back. We’re glad to have you with us.” She paused, and added, “And so is Zoltan. He asked me to tell you that.”

“Uh-huh.” Although church members were hard at work all around us, continuing to put the camp together, Zoltan was nowhere to be seen. “Where is he, anyway?”

“In communion with Byron.” Greer nodded toward his tent, a couple of dozen feet away. It occupied the center of the campsite; I noticed that its door flap was closed. “He spends time alone with one of us each day, in meditation. We try to respect their privacy.”

I remembered how he had made himself absent the day before, while everyone else was working. “And who decides who gets to, um, meditate with him?”

“He does, of course. He picks someone with whom to share communion, takes him or her into his tent.” She pointed to her left forearm. “You know who it is because they’ll wear a black sash around their arm. That means they’re excused from their chores for the rest of the day, so that they may contemplate the lesson Zoltan has given them.” She gave me a sly wink. “So of course we’re very happy about it when Zoltan summons
one of us,” she quietly added, as if letting me in on a secret. “It means we get a day off.”

Communion, my ass. I knew a freeloader when I saw one. I had to admit, though, that extending the same privilege each day to one of his followers was a smart move; it kept the troops in line. But I kept my opinion to myself. “I’m sure he’s busy. I’ll just have to catch up with him some other time.”

“Umm . . .” She hesitated. “One thing you should know is that you don’t approach him first. When he’s ready to speak to you, he will . . . but you’ll have to wait for that moment. Then you can talk to him.”

I nodded, trying to keep a poker face. “Still, there’s a lot I’d like to ask him. After all, he left me hanging last night.”

“Such as?”

“Well, for starters, why he looks like a . . .”

Greer’s hand darted forth to cover my mouth. Ian happened to be walking past at that moment; he cast a dark look in my direction, then hastened away, carrying an armload of fresh-cut sourgrass to a bonfire burning nearby. Greer watched him go, then removed her hand from my face. “We found something queer earlier this morning,” she said, her voice a little more loud than usual. “A plant of some sort. We were hoping you could tell us what it is.”

I glanced again at Zoltan’s tent. He’d already demonstrated a keen sense of hearing. “Sure,” I said, picking myself off the ground. “That’s why I’m here.”

Greer showed me where I could wash my plate and bowl, then led me through the camp, taking me toward the uncleared marshland. We walked slowly, avoiding the people working around us. “You must never speak of this in public,” she said, keeping her voice low. “It’s a sacred thing, the very root of our faith. In fact, I shouldn’t be telling you even this much . . . Zoltan will, when he feels that you’re ready.”

I shrugged. “Maybe so, but yesterday you guys got off a shuttle in full view of several dozen people. They all saw him . . . and believe me, word travels fast in Shuttlefield. Even if I don’t ask, someone else will.”

“I know. The same questions we faced back on Earth.” She shook her head. “Outsiders have a difficult time understanding the
Transformation, how it’s central to our beliefs. That’s why we’re reluctant to speak of it.”

“Sure . . . but Zoltan invited me to join you, right? Even though he knows I’m not a believer.” She nodded. “So if he did, and your people have accepted me, wouldn’t it make sense for me to know?” She frowned, her eyes narrowing as she considered my question. “I promise, it’s just between you and me. Besides, I’ve already brought my stuff over here. Take my word for it, I’m not going back anytime soon.”

“Well . . .” She glanced around. “But only if you won’t tell anyone I told you.”

I promised her that I wouldn’t. By then we were away from the center of the camp; no one else was around. Greer knelt down behind a vacant tent, and in a hushed voice she told me about the Holy Transformation of Zoltan Shirow.

It happened during the Dixie Rebellion, back in 2241 when a
small group of Southern nationalists, nostalgic for the United Republic of America—and before that, the Civil War of the 1860s—attempted to stage an insurrection against the Western Hemisphere Union. For several months, the Army of Dixie committed terrorist acts across the South, planting bombs in government offices in Memphis and Atlanta and assassinating government officials in Birmingham, until the Agencia Security succeeded in breaking up the network. With most of their leaders arrested, the surviving Dixies retreated to the hill country of eastern Tennessee, where they battled Union Guard troops dispatched to arrest them.

One of the Guard soldiers sent in for the mop-up operation was one Corporal Zoltan Shirow, a young recruit who had never seen combat duty before. His patrol was searching for a Dixie hideout near the town of McMinnville when they were caught in an ambush that killed the rest of his team. Critically wounded, Corporal Shirow managed to escape in a maxvee, only to crash his vehicle in a patch of woods just outside town.

“This is the First Station,” Greer said. “Zoltan the warrior, the sinner without knowledge of God.”

“All right,” I said. “I got that part. . . .”

She held up a hand. “It was then that he was discovered by the Redeemer, and brought to the Room of Pain and Understanding.”

The Redeemer went by the name of Dr. Owen Dunn. The Universalists held a special place for him in their mythology roughly analogous to John the Baptist and Satan rolled into one, but the truth was much more prosaic, as I later learned. Dr. Dunn had moved from Nashville to McMinnville some years earlier, when he set up a small private practice. On the surface, he appeared to be little more than a country doctor, mending broken bones and delivering babies. What no one knew was that he had secretly continued the research that had caused him to be dismissed from the faculty of the Vanderbilt University School of Medicine.

Dunn was interested in the creation of
homo superior
. Unlike scientists engaged in genengineering, though, he believed that it was possible to refashion a full-grown adult into a posthuman, using nanoplastiosurgical techniques he had developed while at Vanderbilt. The medical school considered his research to be unethical, though, and rightly so; Dunn could be charitably described as a quack, yet it’s more accurate to say that he was a biomedical researcher who had gone insane. To put it in blunt—albeit clichéd—terms, he was a mad doctor.

Before leaving Vanderbilt, he stole some experimental nanites from the med school laboratory, and while living in McMinnville he had quietly continued his research, hoping eventually to produce a breakthrough that would restore his standing in the scientific community. To that end, Dunn had invested his earnings in the surreptitious purchase of commercial medical equipment—including a cell regenerator of the type used in hospitals for the cloning of new tissue—which he set up in the basement of his house. When that wasn’t sufficient, his experiments took on a gothic air. He resorted to disinterring freshly buried bodies from nearby cemeteries. As Dunn himself would later admit, once he had been arrested and brought to trial, his methods were reminiscent of
Frankenstein
, even though they yielded positive results. Over time, he learned how to restructure flesh and bone from deceased donors into whatever form he desired.

The major drawback, of course, was that he needed a living person to complete his studies . . . and for what he intended to do, it was unlikely that he’d find any volunteers. So when Dunn found the wounded Corporal Shirow in the woods near his house, he was presented with an opportunity he couldn’t pass up.

Zoltan was unconscious and close to death, but it was a relatively simple matter to remove the bullet from his left shoulder, perform emergency surgery, and let him heal. During this time, the doctor kept the soldier unconscious. Strapped down on an operating table in Dunn’s basement, there was little chance of anyone finding him; conveniently, the Union Guard assumed that Corporal Shirow had become a deserter. Dunn cloned samples of Shirow’s tissue until he had sufficient living flesh and cartilage for his purposes. Once he was sure that the soldier was healthy enough to undergo further operations, Dunn went to work.

“This was the Second Station,” Greer told me. “The Redeemer transformed Zoltan into a figure he had seen in his dreams, an avatar of what he considered to be a perfectly adapted form.”

“A bat?” I stared at her.

“If that’s how you see him, then yes, that’s what he looks like. We believe that the Redeemer, however misguided he may have been, was working under divine influence . . . that God instructed him to make a man who would resemble Lucifer, in order to test the will of those who would meet him.”

“Who came up with this?”

Greer smiled. “Zoltan did. During the Holy Transformation.”

Those who later investigated the incident found that Dunn had drawn inspiration from the Gustav Dore illustrations of
The Inferno
, the demons Dante described as occupying the inner circles of Hell. Yet the worst thing that Dunn did to Zoltan was to keep the soldier conscious; because he wanted to study his reactions, Dunn used local anesthesia whenever possible. As a result, Shirow was aware of everything that was going on, even as he lay facedown on the operating table while the doctor
meticulously grafted new cartilage and muscle to his shoulder blades, patiently building blood vessels and splicing nerves, eventually cutting fatty tissue from Zoltan’s thighs and midriff when Dunn’s supply of cloned flesh ran low. In his own sick way, Dunn was brilliant; not only were the new wings not rejected, but Zoltan was gradually able to manipulate them.

Once that phase was successful, Dunn went to work on the soldier’s face and hands. And for that, too, Zoltan was the sole witness. The cinder-block basement had no windows, and the nearest neighbor lived a half mile away. By the time Zoltan’s screams were heard by a former patient who happened to drop by one afternoon to deliver a gift to the good doctor, there was little left of the lost soldier’s mind.

“It was during his ordeal,” Greer went on, “that Zoltan arrived at the Third Station, for while he suffered, he heard the voice of God, telling him that there was a purpose to this.”

“Which was . . . ?”

“God gave Zoltan a mission.” Although she spoke in hushed tones, she looked me straight in the eye, making sure that I understood everything she said. “He was to spread His word to all who would look past his new form, telling them that humanity was about to undergo a universal transformation . . . not of the body, but of the soul.” She smiled then. “Through the Redeemer’s actions, God chose Zoltan to be His prophet.”

Another way of looking at it was that Zoltan Shirow went mad. That much was clear to me, even if it wasn’t to her. During the endless hours, days, and weeks he’d spent in Dunn’s basement lab, held immobile while the doctor carefully reshaped his body, the patient gradually slipped over the edge of sanity. And no wonder; if I’d experienced what he had been through, I probably would have been talking to God myself. The mind finds ways of dealing with pain.