Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet (38 page)

  
A scalding heat pressed against him and an arid wind whistled in his ear.  The
knots of hair swayed before his eyes.  Small puffs of dirt blew from his lips
and the loose hairs backlashed with the wind.

  
His eyes blinked open. 

  
He was prostrate with his face in the dirt and he felt his limbs stir.   He
could move. 

  
Bringing his palms flat on the floor, he pushed himself up.  The dust sifted
through his fingers and poured off his back and through the seams in his gear. 
He lifted his sights to an endless, scorched plane, extending out unto the
horizon where the dry, fawn earth met with the blood-red sky behind a cloud of
acrid dust. 

  
He staggered to his feet and gazed about, turned and turned on the spot.  Not a
soul in sight. 

  
Kamchatka…

  
He had been in this wasteland before.  Had he ever left? 

  
The image of Pope’s augur eyes and the sound of his voice were clear in memory
as the revelations. 

  
“Vincent…” he muttered in a daze. 

  
His thoughts were all awry: no sense of being asleep, awake, alive or dead.

  
“Naomi.”

  
His throat was so dry he could barely breathe her name.

  “Naomi…”

   
He stumbled, fell in the dust, lifted himself up, then stumbled and fell on his
knees again.  Had it been a nightmare?  Was it all true?  Which was the
nightmare and which was the memory?  Perhaps they were both true.  A dual
reality did not seem even implausible anymore.  The thoughts tore him to
pieces.  He palmed his head, grimacing, teeth grinding.  The tears stung like
acid. 

  
“NO!”

  
He threw his head back, baying at the red, red sun.

 
 He came to his feet and almost stumbled a third time. 

  
“
Saul…
”  A small voice whispered in the wind. 

  
He gasped and his eyes gaped. 

  
“Naomi…” 

  
The whispers came again and he spun around trying to find the voice. 

  
“Where are you?” he muttered incessantly. “Where are you?”

  
Silence fell across the desert again. 

  
“NAOMI!”

  
“
Saul
.”  The voice altered and became suddenly deeper, more orotund.

  
He stopped, breathless, and stared into the bright red disc over the horizon. 

  
“Saul.”

  
The godlike voice resounded across the land.  He suddenly felt as though he was
being drawn into the flaming disc, as the light became brighter and the air hotter
and hotter, searing him.  Throwing his arms back, all of the torture unbridled
in one great howl.

  
He re-awoke. 

  
His eyelids recoiled from the same blinding light that had ushered him from one
nightmare to the other.  He tried to start but could not.  His body had gone
dead again.  The mask was removed from over his face and the dark outline of a
head emerged between him and the white light shining from above. 

  
“Saul.” 

  
The same orotund voice from before spoke, resonant through the haze of his
waking.

  
“The girl, Saul.”

  
“Naomi…”

  
“Had the thought of killing her ever crossed your mind?  A dream perhaps?”

  
He wanted so badly to reach out and strangle the looming head.

  
“Yes…” Pope hummed, nodding.  “Moments of affection.  Re-enactments of past
events.  The more typical causes…”

  
The silhouette withdrew from the light.

  
He felt himself rising again, cocooned in his familiar seat, in the middle of
the circle of light, surrounded by the same congregation of obscure figures,
with Eastman sitting in his usual place.  He could still feel the heat of the
blaze from the wasteland. 

  
He had lost count of how many times he had woken from one realm to the other,
though he could remember each world vividly after each crossover.  His body may
have rested, but his mind had had no respite.   As soon as one nightmare ended,
another began: no point of reference for time.  His skin had healed but it may
or may not have been reconstructed, and with age-suppressant medicine these
days, even the aging of the flesh was nothing to go by.

  
“Things are different this time, Saul.” 

  
Pope began pacing, forming circles with his paces once again. 

  
“You have never been one to choose death over life,” said the neuralist.  “You
have always been led back into the cycle by the vain hope that you might
somehow be able to break it so long as you kept trying.  But, this girl…’ his
voice took a dip of loathing.  “She has latched onto you in a way unprecedented
in any previous case.  I fear we may lose you forever.”

  
“What does it matter to you?”

  
“You think too little of yourself.”

  
“I could die in a war zone tomorrow.”

  
“The duration of your life is irrelevant.”

  
Pope’s answers were quick, sharp and calculated.  He went on circling,
disappearing and reappearing from his peripheral vision, the sound of the
deliberate footfalls ringing through the dark.

  
“A note of irony, in passing,” Pope digressed:  “At the time of his untimely
death at your hands, Senator Clarke Jones had been a leading anti-militarist
prospect for the U.S. presidency.  His assassination at your hands inspired the
fear and hatred that would forever separate our worlds … That’s right,” he
added with subtle delight:  “The world which you so despise – without you, it
might never have existed. 
We
might never have existed.  You, Saul, are
perhaps our greatest living hero.  You should know it pains me to see you this
way.”

  
“Then kill me,” he groaned weakly.

  
Pope stopped momentarily, turned to him and lifted his head with a sigh.

  
“You despise us, Saul, because you do not understand us.  Because you despise
us, you resist us – that is only logical.  Therefore, in this session, I shall try
to help you understand our vision.  And let there be no mistake about it:  It
is the
only
vision.”

  
Pope pushed the pince-nez back over his eyes, reached into his suit jacket and
there followed a familiar rattling noise before his hand emerged, wielding a black
canister.  He opened it, rolled a single neural tablet into his hand and cupped
his palm over his mouth, raised his head, swallowed and inhaled deeply. 

  
“I suppose you must have realised by now how the neural program works…”

  
Pope looked to him for the answer.

  
“Memory,” he answered weakly.

 
“Yes,” Pope droned.  “Memory”  He tucked the canister back into his pocket, and
began to pace around again.  “All thought – all
reality
– is locked in
memory,” he preached.  “All is memory and everything is past -- the future and
the present included.  That is difficult, I know.”

  
He paused, as though to allow the thought to permeate. 

 
 “If the past is nothing more than a collection of experiences in the mind, the
future exists only as a set of vague predictions.  We assume, naturally, that
the future will follow the same pattern as the past, but there is no objective
guarantee for this – it is merely useful fiction.  All temporality is the
same.  Time therefore exists only insofar as it is a mental construct.  Or, to
put it simply:  Memory – is the key to time.  Alter one’s perception of time
and you alter his entire disposition to the world: fear, anxiety, guilt,
remorse.  Blur one’s sense of the future and all fear – even fear of death –
dissipates, leaving only the ever-contracting point of the present.  In the
world we envisage, the very notions of past and future will collapse.  There
will
only
be the present – the euphoria of being in the moment – which
we will continually augment.  The balance is a delicate one, which we are
continually perfecting.  It is one of our principal projects.”

  
“You drug the mind,” he muttered, spitefully.

  
Pope stopped and faced him. 

  
“What was that, Saul?”

  
He started to gather his thoughts, and the ire bubbled up again. 

  
“If people regret and fear nothing, they will accept anything,” he said.  “Your
world is blind.  You keep it that way.  That is the only way it survives.”

  
“It is how
you
survived,” he said.  “I have already told you, Saul: Truth
is as arbitrary as the wind __ the product of random atomic collisions without
meaning or purpose beyond our own propagation, no more existent than the past
or the future.  Living a lie was the only thing that allowed you to assume some
semblance of sanity.”

  
He wanted desperately to counter – to howl at the top of his lungs that they
were the ones slowly crafting a world of lies and war.  It would have made no
difference.  He already knew what Pope’s response would have been, and it would
have been correct.  He, like the rest of the Commission, was nothing more than
a catalyst.  As much as he would have liked to believe they were the tyrants,
they were not. 

  
“The problem lies far deeper than any bullet can pierce.
” 

  
He recalled the words, but not where he had heard them. 

  
How?
 

  
How could the race have freely come to this?  To think that one day the pages
of history would be wiped out and that this would be the default world,
accepted for what it is as a matter of course.  The vision flashed before him
in a curl of flame:  A world at war would be the only world. 

  
No!
 

  
Martial order had to fall. 

  
It
has
to…

  
“Saul.”

  
His eyes opened and he was lifted from his thoughts, drawn back into the cold,
blue eyes.  Pope had that usual look about him, a look that mirrored his own
thoughts back. 

  
“Do you really believe that the world would find its peace if martial order were
to crumble – if our world were to fall?”

  
He had become accustomed to the trick questions.  No doubt Pope was laying some
new trap, designed to mire him in his own presuppositions.  But the answer
seemed elementary and irrefutable: “Martial order
is
war,” he growled.  “If
the war economy falls, there can only be peace.  You keep it alive.  You keep
the cycle going.”

  
A silence of anticipation across the theater preceded Pope’s reply:

  
“No, Saul …” he said, his voice deepening to an abysmal bass.  “
We
keep
the cycle in control.” 

  
Pope started to pace again, his voice exalting:

 
  “Do not fool yourself into thinking that war is the disease, Saul – war is
the cure of the disease!  The world has always known war.  The cycle existed
long before us; it will exist long after.  For centuries, our predecessors made
the mistake of believing that the cycle could and should be averted.  Your
mistake was the same.  Every one of your previous cycles followed precisely the
same pattern, ultimately culminating in a conflict which could not, and cannot,
be resolved any other way other than the destruction of the cause.  The cycle
always
ends where it begins.  You might think, as those who came before us, that war
is some blunder in reason, a symptom of man’s failure as a thinking animal.  In
one sense, that is correct:  All conflict is the resolution of paradox – blown-up
struggle in an essentially flawed mind – synapses fighting to maintain their
rhythm.  The struggle cannot be reasoned away.  It is built into the very
fabric of our thoughts. We are doomed to failure.  There is no escaping the
vicious circle…”