No Dogs in Philly (21 page)

“
Why did you fake your own death?”
she asked him.

“
I didn’t.”

“
So you accidentally faked your
own death?”

“
No. I died—my human body died.
And then I came back. Then I realized what I was, and what my role
was in this world.”

“
So…you died and now you’re what?
A feaster?”

He smiled at her. It was warm, not
condescending, like a grandpa delighted by a precocious child.
Looking at his kindly old Santa Claus face it was almost impossible
to imagine that he had just shot wires into her neck and sucked out
her blood, that he was talking to her above a pit full of thousands
of bodies in front of the cathedral of an alien death cult, and not
in a mall somewhere with a child on his lap asking them what they
wanted for Discount Day.

“
A feaster…yes, that is what you
would call me. No. I studied them, the UausuaU. I wanted to know
about the elzi, what they saw, but I was always afraid to look
myself. I made…others look for me, which I regret, forcing those
people to join in the One. No, I don’t regret the joining, but my
methods were crude, blundering—human. I caused pain, too much pain,
and some were lost. The meeting should come with joy. I think
that’s why they brought me here. To welcome you with
joy.”

He stopped in front of the cathedral door and
she stopped a few feet behind him, resisting the temptation to
split his domey skull with her prod and run away. She’d tried that
already. He reached up a hand to stroke the carving of a naked
thigh—more scenes of joy and love and Eden and frolicking under
trees with your tits hanging out. A split appeared in the center of
the carving, so faint she hadn’t seen it. Light filled the gap and
it grew. The scent of…incense? wafted out as the doors swung inward
and Friar stepped inside. He turned, bathed in the light of the
entrance, and beckoned with that Santa Claus smile. She sucked in a
breath and followed.

Chapter 18

The dozer was coming. Yesterday it had eaten
the old sneaker factory and vomited out an ocean of tar that its
tentacular cranes had whisked into a parking lot. A strip
mall—that’s what their home would be, and then another strip mall
across from it, and then more malls and stores and strips and malls
and stores. The techies would come in, hungry for the kitsch of
identity, and the embyays and the counters and adjusters and all
those who saw the hoarding of objects as their purpose and comfort.
Hemu pitied them, wished he could walk among them and lend flowers
to their hair. Perhaps they pitied him, and wished to bring him to
a nice house with a large bed and many closets. But that was
unlikely. The hoarders could not look past themselves.

This night was cool—but no wind, a blessing—and
the moon was full, a puddle of pale light amidst the haze. His
brothers and sisters sat quietly, closely, with crossed knees that
brushed against their neighbors’. From here the city was a
waterfall of lights in the distance. They had chosen this building
carefully—above the dozer’s tallest antenna, and a good distance
away, so that the dozer sat in an arena of sorts, clear to
view.

The Slow God spoke to them, taking a long time
as usual. The first note of the first word had come with the
appearance of the strange and vulgar woman. Hemu had heard the
note, and listened closely. You needed to be quiet to hear, and
patient, and to keep your mind free of distraction. That was why
the hoarders could never hear, never understand. Their things,
their objects, hung like chains around them, dragging on their
minds, clamoring with need. And the Sad Gods could not hear because
they were afraid, and their fear was a scream that drove out
wisdom. And the Blue God? Did it know the words of the Slow God?
Did they speak to one another? The Blue God was strong. Strength
could bring ignorance and ignorance eroded strength.

The second note had come in the chapel, loud,
louder than any he had ever heard. It rang each time he touched the
woman, Saru, when their hands brushed and then atop this very
warehouse—when the dozer looked much smaller—the sound had nearly
deafened him as she had grasped his hand. It was too loud to hear
then, surrounding, indistinct. He had given Saru what comfort he
could—so much chaos in her, so much violence. She was a creature of
violence, and chaos, and many forms of motion that created more
motion. The note then had seemed like a warning and he had chilled.
Was Saru a threat? A danger? Was he to lift her as she slept in the
Slow God’s peace and drop her over the edge to die against the
pavement? It was not the way of the Slow God, he admonished
himself. It was his own fear, fear of her violence leading him to
his own.

Tonight had come the third note and the word
had become clear. It was a beautiful word, as all the words of the
universe were when you took the time to listen—and also
frightening. So they had come, in a long procession to the top of
the building, and then sat and held hands for a while, to share
comfort and let it grow among them. They had sung, a long, slow
chant that came from the belly, each note guided into place by the
Slow God so that together they could—in the crude mechanism of the
human voice, the muscles slapping and strumming one another and the
vibrations bouncing along their throats—find each other in the cool
night air and dance and meet and join in love. It seemed that the
haze lifted then and the lights of man all vanished, and all that
was was the mood, bright and close, and a billion points of light
spread over the galaxy that were the notes of their song. He had
wept then, as had the others, because of the longing and the
knowing, and then they had dried their tears and drawn apart and
fallen each into his own silence and pondering of the Slow God’s
word.

A tiny star drifted up from below, like a pale
blue lightning bug, he imagined, though he had never seen a real
one. It was followed by another, and another—a dozen tiny
blue-white stars drifting lazily through the dark. He watched the
flower in front of him, dangling from a thin vine growing out of
the cracks. What wisdom his God had, what power to bring life to
this old building, to draw such green from the crumbling mortar,
the matchstick crack between two bricks, and from that vine to
bring such a pretty flower, a perfect white bell that rang with the
words of peace. He watched as the delicate petals opened,
unfolding, revealing a tiny galaxy of colors, no larger than a
pinhead. It seemed as he stared into the flower, that he was again
looking at the bright night sky with the moon and the stars and all
of existence spread overhead. The galaxy in the flower went dark,
and a blue-white speck of pollen drifted up to join the hundreds of
its brothers and sisters to dance in the night sky.

More and more, and now they came together and
formed crawling shapes of light. They seemed to have no fixed
dimension, to be single points and then flat and then a full
dynamic three, and it seemed they strayed into other dimensions,
that he was watching and re-watching the colors come together and
grow and merge and take shape. He looked down at his hands and they
were old and wrinkled, with aches in the knuckles and wrists. He
touched his face and felt the ridges of painful acne that had
caused him loneliness and unhappiness before he was a man. And then
he was a baby, a child, unable to control his head and the colors
followed him as he tottered over, but he was always Hemu and he
sat, cross-legged, and watched the Slow God enter his
world.

The shape She chose was humanoid. They had told
Her this was a good shape for navigating the world and would not
cause much distress. She had chosen to be a woman for they showed
greater patience and endurance in Her mind. She lamented the fact
that there were so few forms of life to choose from on this
planet—everything that thrived was vermin. They told Her it was not
always like this, and She looked deep into their memories, the
memories of their bodies and their fathers and their father’s
fathers, far, far back and saw all that Earth once was. She had
wept for them to live like this, knowing what had been, but they
could not see into their own flesh memories and could not know the
way in which they had been cheated.

Now She was whole. Tall, taller than the dozer,
taller than the warehouse, taller than the Gaesporan tower in the
dark. She could be seen for hundreds of miles, a blue-white giant,
nebulous, shifting, a body with two legs and two arms, that swam
more than walked across the earth. What did the others feel, the
hoarders and elzi, their ward hips, and the Sad Gods in their
tower? Did they tremble? Did they rub their eyes and shake away
their doubts, confused by the pollution of drugs they forced into
their vessels? Did they run in fear or run with hope and joy
towards the God striding amidst their city. Or could they even see
Her, blinded as they were with their devotion to distraction, to
the anything-but-life they clung to as their own form of
spirit?

She turned towards the warehouse where Hemu
sat, a shifting mass of color, twisting and melding so the arms
swung around and passed through them. He felt the warmth and color
of Her, a sensation of suckling at his mother’s breast, a smell of
clove and fresh rain. It seemed he was there in the warmth of Her
for a long time, his whole life maybe, and that perhaps he had died
and was in fact another person, and maybe this had happened many,
many times. Then the color and the warmth withdrew, drifting away
like a cloud, slowly, so that the knowledge of Her absence did not
come too suddenly and strike them with despair. She was singing to
them, every color a note, and they joined in, adding where they
could, and he felt that their song reached across the city and
touched each soul and told them of peace.

She moved towards the dozer, the hateful
machine, grunting and sputtering, spewing noise and smoke. Her body
wrapped around it, sinking down and becoming a sphere. How like an
ocean She looked, he could almost see the fish and life swimming
within Her. And then he realized it was a vision, and he saw as far
as his mind could what She truly was in Her own dimension, an
ocean, a living ocean of unified sentience. She was a single
consciousness formed by the trillion creatures of a planet-sized
sea. She and the beings like Her traveled through the space of Her
universe and intermingled, coming together and separating in twos
and threes and sometimes millions, the creatures within them
forming new ecosystems, new consciousness, and new unified
sentience. And he saw that this world, his world, was anathema to
Her, with its dead, acid oceans and ponds of tar and oil, and the
supreme dominance of a single species destroying any chance of
shared life. But She came, came to show peace, to show what could
be, and the gift of his life or every life on Earth was not a
worthy show of gratitude.

He gasped and the vision broke, his mind
strained and twisted by the knowledge of another world, and he did
not weep but sob and cry and wail and beat his fists against the
stones of the roof. As the vision faded, his memory dimmed, his
mind moving back into its familiar ruts to save him from the
knowing; he controlled his tears and stilled his breath and wrapped
himself in the peace of his God who was good. He watched as the
sphere around the dozer grew brighter and shimmered and then seemed
to pop like a drop of water and splash through the city. Wherever
the waves touched, the filth and decay of man’s folly was washed
away, and in its place lay a carpet of the Earth that was. Hemu
knew that this was the Slow God’s gift to man, and that in the new
order, the new world that would be built in flames tonight, She
would protect all who sought peace beneath the trees.

Chapter 19

Regret. The one time in her life she’d showed
restraint it had come back to bite her in the ass. If she hadn’t
pulled her aim at the last second, that bullet would have gone
right through Friar’s skull. Sure she’d still be in a pickle, but
at least she’d have the satisfaction of seeing his head pop open
and his traitorous blood drizzle out, and she could skip over and
kick him again and again and laugh and maybe sing a song. But now
she was being led by his black-clad ass into a cathedral that as
far as she could tell was hovering over/supported by a pile of
bodies. In fact, she was starting to suspect that the cathedral
itself was made of bodies. The columns and inner walls and the
ceiling were all carved in impossible detail with frolicking,
joyful bodies touching and feeling and fucking one another. The
bases of the columns seemed to be wetter, rawer almost, and they
melded with the floor—oh fuck, the floor. It felt like hard black
marble but looking close she could see all the whirls and patterns
were bodies, all melted together and flattened, grinning, yawning,
and screaming up at her.

There were no candles or incense holders,
golden watchamacallits or carpets or tapestries—the normal shit
you’d find in a church. The shape was a little off too, more like a
plus sign than a cross. There were arches (formed of stone? No,
bodies of course) and windows, but there was no glass. The ceiling
rose up into a dome, which was open up top, and all light came from
that strange golden mist. It seemed to her that the singing was
louder in here, which was odd because it seemed to be empty—not
even any pews—except for her and Friar. Her boots were clacking too
loudly against the flesh-marble, and she marveled that with all the
other tension, the blood loss, the knowledge she was going to be
killed in an awful way, the anger, a little bit of fear, maybe more
than a little—despite it all she found room to be annoyed at the
sound her boots made.