Heaven (21 page)

“But all servants of the One know that Heaven exists,” one of the Hytth objected, his reedy barks smoothly replaced by human
phonemes in Sam’s earpiece.

“It is not the
existence
of Heaven that the blimp denies,” Sam’s instructor clarified. “It is its desirability. And so he has not only withdrawn his
own cooperation from the advancement of his Community world; he has sought to involve others in the same mistaken action—to
the detriment of their own lifesouls, as well as that of the Community. Worse, several of these clusters of heresy have succeeded,
in their own terms, in disrupting the will of the Church. They have caused untold damage and brought irreversible death to
thousands of their fellows.”

The blimp struggled feebly against its bonds. “Heaven is an illusion,” it gasped. Sam suddenly noticed that it had been equipped
with a small communicator. “Better a clean death than the obscenity of unnaturally extended existence!”

“You see how deep the problem lies,” said the !t!. “Despite all efforts, this poor entity’s lifesoul wallows in heresy and
rejects all healing. Our prayers for his recovery have gone unheeded; our love has been rejected. So now we must harden our
love and hope that he will respond to treatment.” The many-limbed querist turned to the cluster of technicians and pointed
with his palps. “Begin.”

Whatever they were doing, Sam thought, it was well rehearsed; evidently, this was routine for the Hytth. The assistants made
various changes to their equipment and were still.

Something about the room changed.

The blimp quivered; then Sam heard a strange moaning sound. It grew in volume until his head seemed filled with it; then,
suddenly, it cut off.

“The client’s communicator has been filtered for our comfort,” said the Rhemnolid. Next to him, the blimp began to writhe,
as if in pain.

The !t! querist leaned close, gazing into the creature’s large eyes. The room’s translation field continued to interpret the
frequency modulations of its bursts of clicks, broadcasting them to the various species present in their own language. “Clutch-the-Moon,
our friend, our client, you cannot continue in your heresy. We beg you to recognize your error, to heal your mind . . . to
accept the miracle of Heaven and the persistence of the body, the sustenance of the lifesoul.”

Now Sam could hear the blimp moaning even without the communicator. The !t! continued to talk quietly to the client, apparently
unmoved by its distress, its murmurs forming a counterpoint to the noises coming from the blimp. The tone of voice was comforting,
but the words were pointed and unrelenting.

There was a sizzling sound, and a wisp of—smoke?—rose from one of the blimp’s tentacles. The creature went berserk, struggling
frantically to escape the clamps that held it to the dais. More wisps of smoke appeared.

The moaning increased in pitch. Sam was baffled. What was happening? What kind of medical procedure was this?

The client’s skin color was changing, from its usual sallow khaki to pale yellow. Blisters were starting to form in the blimp’s
skin. With a shock, Sam realized that his own life-support wrap no longer had to make much effort to keep him warm. The temperature
in the room had risen sharply in a few minutes.

This was no accident, Sam realized. The Hytth had deliberately adjusted the settings. The icicle hanging above the dais had
started to melt. Drops of water were falling onto the outstretched tentacles. When they hit, the flesh burned.

That was why the dais had been placed beneath an icicle: to induce terror, and then pain.

Everyone knew that blimps were cold-world creatures. They could no more tolerate liquid water than a human could stand superheated
steam. How could the querists . . .

With a heart-stopping jolt, Sam realized exactly what kind of medical procedure he was witnessing.

“So now,” Sam’s instructor said, “you begin to understand. Let me summarize your feelings: You are horrified; you are shocked;
you are confused. Your mind is seething with contradictions. Your heart races; your blood feels like ice. Above all, you feel
betrayed.

“I know how you feel, because I have felt such distress myself. All this is normal. Necessary. But now you must make a giant
step and transcend the narrow confines of ordinary emotion, as every healer must. You know this, but you hesitate. You feel
inadequate. You cannot see where the leap will lead.

“You are in desperate need of spiritual guidance, but you no longer believe you can trust me.” The Veenseffer-co-Fropt’s olfactory
tufts brushed Sam’s cheek; Sam turned away in disgust. “But you
can
trust me, Samuel. Why else would I have chosen you to witness what you have just seen? I have concealed nothing from you.
Quite the reverse.
The Church wants you to know
. And you must ask yourself why. It cannot be to conceal a squalid secret, can it?”

The two of them were back in the instructor’s quarters after the most harrowing six hours of Sam’s life. He had learned exactly
what it would take to advance in the Community. Oh, yes, he had learned! And now he felt sick.
That
was not what his beloved Church existed for! It was the very antithesis of everything he had been taught—the values of universal
love and tolerance.

And yet . . .

There was a horrible kind of logic to it. It had been explained to him, minute by minute, by the three querists, just as they
had explained it to the object of their intimate attentions. The Memeplex was powerful and compelling. Its flaws, if it had
flaws, eluded him, even though he
knew
they had to be obvious.

Love has no limits. Love values what is best. What is
best
is not always what you want. A healer must make difficult choices and live with their consequences.

“Before you can fully understand what you have been shown,” his instructor continued in a translated tone of voice that Sam
had never heard from him before—a mix of sadness, sincerity, solicitude . . . a kind voice, a concerned voice, a voice he
wanted
to trust but could not—“you must express your emotions. Bring them into the open where we can examine them together.”

Nothing.

“Fourteen Samuel! Do you wish to overcome your human limitations? To unite with the Cosmos? Then you must open your heart
and mind. To me. Now.”

“You—you killed him,” said Sam. “One of the Lifesoul- Cherisher’s creatures.”

“His death was not intended,” said the instructor. “We wanted him to live.”

“So that you could continue the torture,” said Sam. “You—you broiled him alive. You deliberately changed the environment of
the room to inflict suffering. You
warmed
him! A blimp! Clutch-the-Moon Splitcloud was a member of the Community! He was a sentient being!” Sam’s voice wavered, he
could hardly form the words.

“Yes, he was indeed sentient . . . and that was his tragedy. Only a sentient can
sin,
Samuel. Ethical error is the prerogative of intelligence. The beasts of soil and fluid are immune from sin, for they cannot
comprehend its nature. But Clutch-the-Moon’s heresy was a terrible one, and it led him to a terrible end.

“So sad. So predictable, I now see. The path of error was too tempting for him. You should understand that I knew him. For
half my life I have known him as a friend.” The querist ducked his body to affirm the truth of his words. “Oh, yes. We trained
together. You thought he was unknown to me? A random victim, plucked from the nameless masses? Not so. He was a friend, a
friend of all three of us, and he had become a heretic. That is why he had been designated as a monk. He was plucked from
his Community and conveyed here because his lifesoul was in mortal peril.

“
You
are training as a lifesoul-healer; now know what that entails. For many months we have been trying desperately to heal our
friend. Our failure brought us all to this.”

“
Heal
him?” Sam was screaming, his face twisted by anger and grief. “You
tortured
him, for his unorthodox beliefs, and he resisted despite all the pain and terror. When he finally could stand no more and
began to recant his heresies, you told him that you did not believe he was truly repentant, and you instructed his tormentors
to redouble their efforts!”

The instructor leaned closer, its voice insistent but quiet. “It is so difficult to do what is necessary, Sam. Poor, single-minded
Sam . . . You must recognize that at that moment, Clutch-the-Moon would have said
anything
to stop the work of healing. Put yourself in his place. If your body was immersed in boiling water, what would you be willing
to
say
to make the torment stop? You would deny your lineage, deny your own name, deny the Church itself! But in order for poor
Clutch-the-Moon’s lifesoul to be truly healed, it was necessary to cause him to restructure his mind. He had to
believe,
you see, not just pretend. And the verdict of the verifiers cannot be ignored.
He did not believe
. He
still
denied the reality and the desirability of Heaven! In the innermost recesses of his mind,
nothing had changed
.”

“But—why torture?” Sam protested, still in denial, still unable to accept the reasoning of his spiritual superiors. He was
risking a very severe reprimand, but he didn’t care. “Why not use reason, drugs?”

“Reason had already failed, and drugs are useless. A drugged mind is not a true mind. The belief of a subverted consciousness
cannot be trusted. But pain—pain
heightens
reality. When a heightened consciousness truly changes its beliefs, the change is permanent and genuine. Drugs produce only
the illusion of change; remove the drug and the mind will revert. Remove the pain, and true belief remains. Pain is purifying;
it focuses the will. And that is the key, Samuel: the will. The client must be led to recognize his error
of his own free will
. Pain is the universal route to such recognition in all sentients, for pain cannot be denied. It has a reality that transcends
all delusions, Samuel. That is why it evolves in all sentient creatures. Its function is to preserve life, by warning of damage
to the body. The more impossible it becomes to ignore those warnings, the better pain serves its evolutionary function. And
thus it forms our last resort against spiritual death.”

The instructor fiddled with his tufts, as if his own beliefs were in doubt. He had expended much time and love training the
young human; he looked worried that his efforts might be wasted. “You judge us as cruel, but we were acting out of love. And
we could see that we were still failing our friend. The attitudinal changes we had succeeded in inducing were still superficial.
We knew that, and it pained us. We could have stopped our work of healing, but our friend deserved better. The treatment had
to continue, even though we felt every scald as if the flesh had been our own. Our love for our friend had to override our
qualms about inflicting pain.”

“So then you let the room cool, to keep him alive,” said Sam. “And you turned to knives instead of heat. And when he still
did not convince you of the sincerity of his recantation, the tortures got worse . . . until finally he died.” Sam’s eyes
brimmed with tears—the first time he had cried since childhood. “I was glad when he died.”

The Veenseffer-co-Fropt wriggled in despair. “Ah, so
that
is the depth of your perception. Shallow indeed, Samuel. Pain is transient, but death is eternal. I was
sorry
when my poor deluded, misguided friend died, for he died with the lifesoul of a heretic, and now he is lost forever to the
Community.”

“You call pain such as that
transient
?”

“It lasted only a few hours. The lifesoul lasts a lifetime. I had high hopes that the pain would transform him, and heal him
so that he ceased to err. He was not supposed to die, Samuel! His wounds would have left him badly deformed, but his deformity
would inspire our love to greater heights, not diminish it. Death? That was not the lesson intended for you! My poor friend
had an illness, a bodily weakness that the attendant physicians had not suspected.”

“There is some mercy, then,” Sam said flatly.

The querist looked drained. “I have lost a
friend,
Samuel. A dear friend who went horribly astray. I voluntarily took upon myself the burden of healing him, which led to his
suffering and his accidental death. I do not wish to lose a promising student on the same day! Your attitude is natural, but
it is too simplistic. I must explain, and you must listen.”

Sam snorted in disgust. The querist persisted.

“To gain a proper understanding of what you have just been privileged to witness, Fourteen Samuel, you must assume for a moment
that in similar circumstances our methods would normally have persuaded the heretic of his error. What then?”

Sam was confused by the sudden change of tack. “Then the body would have been damaged, but—”

“But the lifesoul would be saved, and cherished eternally.”

“Yes.”

A triumphant flush of warmth spread over the querist’s surface. “Then there is no comparison, is there, Samuel? No choice
but one, however terrible its short-term consequences.”

“It’s a foul bargain,” protested Sam, desperately seeking a way out of the logical maze. “Extremes of agony to correct a misconception
in doctrine.”

“An instant of anguish to be set against an eternity of blessedness,” the instructor contradicted. “And throughout our disputation
you have forgotten that Clutch-the-Moon was responsible for the death of thousands, wrenched from Heaven without their consent,
to fuel his megalomania.”

There it was again, just as Sam had been taught. The irresolvable dilemma. The conflict of interests that made ethics possible,
and necessary. If all choices were easy, there would be no need to choose wisely. The querist’s reasoning was finally beginning
to make sense to Sam—he could think of nothing that he had been taught that could refute it.
Nothing!
But still he struggled against its logic. The reality was so awful. “Is such butchery necessary? It’s disgusting, appalling!
How can the Church preach tolerance, yet behave with such cruelty?”