Saul of Sodom: The Last Prophet (39 page)

  
Pope’s voice faded into the violent flow of his thoughts.  He spoke as one
would expect of a man who had never seen a battlefield, who had never seen
bodies broken apart, entire cities razed to ruins -- incinerated, obliterated. 
Before long, he stopped with his back turned to him and his head raised. 

  
“As long as we live, the fire of war will continue to burn, steadily purging
the race.”

  
“No!” he broke again, breathless with vexation. “It will stop,” he slurred.

  
Pope lowered his head again and turned. 

  
“How?”

  
“It is inevitable.”

  
“And why would you imagine that?”

  
“The race will not sustain itself on war forever!  It
has
to end!”

  
“That is where you are wrong.”  Pope bowed his head.  “For you see, the race
has not only sustained itself on war but thrived on it.  We are the living
proof.  War is, was and always will be one thing and one thing only: the
pursuit of power – the will of man to unremittingly supersede himself without
restraint.  Can you not see that
we
are the manifestation of that will,
Saul?  What has always driven man to new heights if not the will to power?” 

  
Pope’s eyes flashed, his voice escalated and his expression became suddenly
indignant, fanatical, relentless.

  
“Do you honestly believe that a society built upon your fatuous notions of
peace, love and altruism would ever stand up to
us
?  We would annihilate
them!  Wipe them clean out of existence!  You do not need me to tell you this. 
You already know that it is true.  You beheld that dung heap of dead renegades
– you took part in their destruction.  Remember that image, Saul. 
That
is what becomes of anyone who defies the new order.”

  
“It will self-destruct,” he growled. “You cannot build a world on unceasing
death.”

  
“Death has always been the hero of our story.  It is something all men have
done and every man must do if the race is to endure.  Progress demands the
elimination of the weak.  The value of a dimitar is measured in blood.  Death
is the final expression of power.  Without it, power would not exist.”

  
“What about life?”

  
“Life,” Pope echoed definitively, “a fleeting commodity that must be exploited
to the utmost for however long it lasts – whether the duration is thirty years
or eighty makes no difference in the grander scheme of things.  Do you really
suppose that the individual will ever regard his own ephemeral existence as
anything more?  If so, tell me what it could be…  Tell me what difference it
makes whether a life, however brief, is claimed by war rather than disease,
famine or age.  Perhaps you imagine that the wars will escalate out of control
to the point of mass destruction…”

  
“It will happen sooner or later.”

  
“No.  It will not,” Pope averred, gravely.  “The war economy ensures that that
we will never cross the point of no return.  To be sure: all economies rise and
recede but they always balance out in the end.  The world could have
obliterated itself long ago, yet here we stand, you and I, as we have for
millennia, and the wars shall go on now and forever as they always have.  The
reason is simple: the very thrill of power that drives the wars demands that
the race endures.  It will never destroy itself.  Our order will continue to
grow until it is the only
order.”

  
At this point, Pope was at full momentum, lifting one hand aloft as though a
globe were suspended on his fingertips, invoking the heavens as witness to his
words, galvanised by the silent reverence of his congregation of acolytes. 
There was no objection for which he was not prepared, no flaw in the insane
vision that had not been meticulously resolved. 

  
“People cannot live with war forever,” Saul averred with dogged denial.  “They
cannot suffer it …  They
will
not.”

  
Pope lowered the raised hand and crossed both arms at his back again. 

  
“What is there to suffer?” he resumed, quietly.  “You think that we lack
something essential that mankind requires, love perhaps…?  Do not be
nonsensical, Saul.  Do you really suppose that human affection offers something
we cannot?  Do you believe that love has any less of a propensity toward war
than pride, greed, retribution or any other cause that you deem ignoble?”

  
“Love is the opposite of war.”

  
Pope stopped at once on his words.

  
“Is that so?” he purred, deviously. 

  
It was almost as if he had detected the flash of insecurity in his words. 
Knowing what he knew now: the dejected and contemptible thing that he was, the
unforgivable past – who was
he
to speak of …
love
? (The word had
become so suddenly insipid).  But, even though he himself might have been
neither capable nor worthy of it did not mean that it was not real.  It had to
be real!  If there were one – just one – axiom that could be appealed to
against the lunatic perversion of martial order,
it
had to be the only
thing left. 

  
Naomi
… 

  
She was his last vestige of hope.  His last preserve.

  
“Naomi.”

  
Saul opened his eyes again when the frozen voice uttered her name. 

  
Pope was now standing feet in front of him, the ashen visage closer and more
substantial than ever before.  The ice-blue eyes flaunted some fresh and
sinister purpose, as he leaned forward and whispered, chillingly:  “We have
her, Saul.”

  
His breath jolted to a stop.  All his thoughts foundered.

  
“Suppose I told you,” Pope continued, with maniacal relish in his voice, “that
we are going to torture her … defile her in ways even
you
could not
imagine.  Torment which we shall inflict in steady increments over several
days, beginning with her body, easing into her mind until the plea for us to
kill her is all she can think to cry through the pain.” 

  
He visualised the torture unfold before his eyes with Pope’s every word: heard
the sounds of the helpless cries and squeals of agony. 

  
A blaze went through his blood and the thin red lines split and forked over his
bloated eyes.  The swelling fury made his fingers twitch through the deadness. 
He would destroy Pope; tear him limb from limb!  He would slaughter everyone in
that room!  His respires came out in savage growls through borne teeth.

  
Pope rose, smirked and snorted.

  
“Look at you,” he said with scorn; “primed to kill at the mere suggestion of
any harm coming upon her!  Why, you would kill me right now if you could!  You
would destroy everyone and everything in the world – and for what?  For love.”

   
He turned and strolled away, raising his voice to a new oration. 

  
“Soon, love will become an archaism – a relic of the past just like you. 
Subsistence.  Pleasure. Pain.  Purpose.  These are the four unique forces that
have driven every human since the inception of the race.  Our purpose is
grounded in the martial economy and the purpose of the martial economy is
power.  Pure propagation of the will – it is the quintessential purpose.”

  
“You are insane,” he mumbled feebly.

  
Pope stopped.  He seemed to snicker. 

  
“You have nothing, nothing with which to defend all your notions of love,
truth, higher principle, peace, paradise, utopia -- nothing but the
high-pitched squeals of your own intuitions and the very defects that have
reduced you to your present state.  You endure only in the hope that we will
put you out of your misery.”

  
“Then do it,” he rumbled.

  
“No,” Pope glowered.  “What you want is an execution.  You cannot hide your
will from
me
, Saul.  If you want to die so badly; ask for it…”

  
He was silent. 

  
He could feel the two words about to break from him.  He wanted so desperately
to say them – anything to bring the torment to an end.  Annihilation had to be
better than 10 more minutes in this world. 

  
He could not.  The promise still bound him to life – that cruel promise.  When
his eyes dropped, defeated, Pope took out the pince-nez, pressed them over his
eyes, then lifted his head up and sighed with exasperation.

  
“Until she is utterly eradicated from your mind, you will be forced to live.”

  
Swirls of arid dust blew up in a squall and flogged him as he trod wearily
onward, dragging his feet in the dust, gaping at the undulating line of earth
and sky under the crimson sun.   An eon had come and gone and that red sun remained
precisely the same distance from the horizon.  The prophecy of absolute martial
order – the inexorable state of war – may have long come true.  And Naomi…

  
“Naomi…”

  
His last step planted deep in the dust.  He stopped. 

  
His leg buckled.  He fell to his knee and the pain shot up through his body
with the blow.  He groaned and he wheezed.  The air grated his throat like
fire.  And as he looked up he remembered, now, why he had begun to march toward
the sun.  It was an end he could never quite reach, always bringing him to
where he started.  It almost seemed to be waiting to set before it could rise
again and begin the fresh rotation.  And so it hung there like an augur,
scorning him with the sign of the new cycle. 

  
The bright red orb flashed in his eyes with a scowl. 

  
“What…” he rasped.  “What do you want from me?” 

  
He fell silent, as though waiting for an answer. 

  
“Tell me…” 

  
He fell upon a fist when another gust of red dust blew and toppled him. 

  
His head hung.  The wind ceded. 

  
His scourged back shuddered with the spasms of his sobs and red drops fell from
his eyes and melded with the red sand.  He wondered how many tears of blood
must have been shed to stain the sand so red.  Perhaps this place was more than
the figment of his racked mind.  Perhaps it was a vision of the future: of a
day when the earth would cease to spin, and the blood-soaked ashes of the dead
continued endlessly, covering the face of the globe, over the deep gulfs of
drained oceans.  The image the mind turned in on itself.

  
He lifted his head.  The red lines streaked from the bottoms of his eyes down
to his lips.  His own blood quenched him, denying him death, keeping him alive
for no other purpose than ongoing torment.  He must have bayed at the sun,
begging for annihilation a thousand times.  The agony was worst when he tried
to remember what had brought him there.  The more time (or the impression of
it) elapsed, the more the past faded into oblivion, leaving only the residual
essence of regret ever-rising, eternally grinding at the soul until even the
hope of death was gone.  Somehow the notion that all of this could end with
something as swift and as comfortable as death seemed ludicrous.  There was no
way out.  No atonement to be had anymore.  No forgiveness – no one left to
proffer it.  Only the enduring knowledge of the truth -- that this is where he
belonged.

  
“
Saul
…”

  
The winds whispered his name again.

  
He gazed up at the brightening sun. 

  
“
Saul…
”

  
The light swelled and consumed the sky. 

  
“Saul.”

  
Saul opened his eyes. 

  
He was back in the Sanatorium.  Pope assumed his usual bearing before him,
under the circle of light, the host of silhouettes above and around them in the
theatron, waiting.  Pope’s genuflected head bore the aspect of conquest,
deepened by the contrast with his own inner defeat.

  
“You see clearly, now, Saul,” hummed Pope. 

  
“…Yes,” he murmured.

  
“You are ready to accept what you are.”

  
“Yes…”

  
His voice spoke autonomous of his will.  There was the sense that his every
action and word was an impulse flowing with a continuum, outside his control. 
He had become something mechanical: a bundle of synapses moving with the
undeviating, mindless and unguided laws of time and matter.

  
Pope smiled. 

  
“I knew you would not disappoint us.”  He paused and stepped forward. “Now,” he
said, “you know what comes next.”

  
His head hung and his eyes drooped, unresponsive to the educing stares all
around, beckoning him over the final brink to sanity. 

  
“Your choice, Saul,” stirred Pope.

  
His jaw locked tight in a last effort to fight back the last words of
capitulation.  He had to be the one to say it.  The aberrance toward surrender
was innate in him, but that is not what kept him silent at that moment.  Fate
was inevitable; there was no denying that now.  He understood everything he had
been told.  And because of that, he also understood that there was one thing
left for him to do – one thing standing at the brink of the new cycle. 

  
A spark of will came back to him.  He lifted his eyes.

  
“Take me to her.”

  
Pope observed him silently, momentarily casting a disconcerted gaze over his
shoulder in Eastman’s direction.  He adjusted the pince-nez with an index
finger. 

  
“The cycle is not over,” he muttered. 

  
Their stares remained interlocked. 

  
Pope’s eyes glinted and the crooked, satisfied simper returned.  He looked over
to Eastman again and the latter seemed to assent to some tacit understanding
with a single bow of the head.  Then, Pope nodded to his left and then to his
right. 

  
In the next moment, he heard footsteps come from behind and then stop a few
paces later.  Short, tapping noises came from just behind his ear.  The
sequence of short taps was followed by two quick beeps and a sharp, disengaging
twinge like a bullet leaving the brain, shot through the back of his skull.  A
sudden intake of breath, his eyes flared open and the feeling came back to his
limbs in a wave of tingling, like stickpins beneath his skin.  The sound of
much heavier footfalls approached from ahead as four heavily geared SGs marched
forward, the opaque visors over their eyes, guns at their chests. 

  
Saul lifted an open hand; his fingers swayed up and down and then closed into a
fist.  The cocoon pried off his body.  He rose from his seat and stood still
and unclothed before the theater of onlookers.  The tingling pains moved
through his body in pulses. 

  
One of the Guards stepped forward, wielding a pair of manacles.

  
“It’s alright,” said Pope, coming between them.  “He will not resist.” 

  
Pope stopped inches away, looking directly into his blank eyes.

  
“We will make the arrangements for full expurgation to be effected upon your
return,” he explained in a low voice.  “After that, Saul Vartanian will not
exist.  He will never have existed… 
She
will never have existed.”

  
She will never have existed
, he repeated in his mind.

  
Pope inhaled deeply and exhaled and removed his glasses. 

  
Their stares remained interlocked. 

  
“Goodbye, Saul.”

  
Pope turned and walked away, through the doors at the back of the theatre.  Another
figure came forward and stood in his place.

  
“Take him away,” said Eastman.

  
About an hour later, the Guard vehicle was on the fast lane of Highway Route 6
southbound for Nozick District.  As they flowed back into the bloodstream of
Sodom, the sky above was dark and starless and the metropolis lights were
blurred through a mist which settled just below the highest peaks of the
skyline.  His insentient eyes were on the oncoming traffic and the touring
maglevs zipping past in lines of light against the tinted window.  A
frightening, skeletal face and two haunted eyes stared back from his
reflection.

  
Eastman sat across, breaking his fixed stare to glance at his watch every time
the traffic slowed.  Not a word was uttered until the vehicle decelerated to a
stop right outside the familiar entrance to a terraced low-rise of about 10
floors, lightless windows and façade streaked black. 

  
The engines switched off and the succeeding silence brought him back to
consciousness.  There was the sound of pneumatic hisses, the clicks, rolls and
thuds of opening and closing doors, followed by heavy tramp of boots.  Two
Guards marched up beside the car and came to a halt face to face on either side
of the open door.

  
“We will be waiting,” said Eastman.  “Do you what you have to do.”

  
The snow began to fall the moment he stepped outside the car and drifted in a
kind of spectral trance, through the mist, down the final path through the
portal, down the darkened, cobwebbed corridor, stopping outside the innermost
door.  The number “1” shone on the veneer. 

  
He raised a slow fist and knocked: One.  Two.  Three. 

  
Pause. 

  
One.  Two. 

  
And waited…

  
And waited…

  
The door opened.

 
 He looked up.

  
“…How long has it been?” he asked.

  
“Long enough.”

  
The hermit opened the door wide and stepped aside.

  
As soon as he stepped into the candlelit passage, he seemed to wake precisely
where he stood, as though his mind had come full circle in time and everything
came crashing back in a tide of emotion, disassociated from the past –
everything that happened since the first day of the cycle: the people who had
come and vanished in time, names and events he could no longer remember, never
to be remembered again. 

  
He looked up at the door at top of the stairs.  A warm light seeped out through
the seams.  He could feel her presence like an aura.  She was there.  She was
still there.

  
“She waited for you,” murmured the hermit. 

  
The words went through his core like a bullet. 

  
He lowered his eyes.  His breaths started to shake.  And for a long time, he
stood frozen before the first stair.

  
“Saul…”

  
His head turned slowly toward the hermit and they gazed at one another
silently.  The ravaged look in his eyes imparted what must come next.

  
The hermit accorded with a bow of his head and turned and walked down the
narrow passage into the small room with the two chairs set across from one
another, where the foretelling of this moment had been made. 

  
With stark clarity and a dead, frontward stare into flashback, he proceeded to
recount to the hermit everything that had happened and everything that had been
made known to him: about the massacre at Dolinovka, Naomi’s family, the
destruction of her life at his own hands, about his past, what he was and was
forever doomed to be – the destroyer of all destroyers – a true child of the
martial world.  And he concluded with the three final words of submission: “You
were right,” he said.  “You were right.”

  
The hermit remained silent, his immovable, vaguely commiserative stare
summoning the confession from him.

  
“Take her,” he struggled to get the words out. “Take her as far away from this
place as you can.”

  
“I will.”

  
“Protect her,” he gasped.  “At any cost, protect her.”

  
The hermit nodded. 

  
“She will not understand why it has to be this way,” he said, staring blankly
ahead.  “She may grow to hate me.”

  
“She won’t,” the hermit reassured.  “I will make sure she knows the truth.”

  
A longer silence followed. 

  
Soon, he began to shudder again and his hands trembled furiously, clenching
into tight, shaking fists of sorrow.  He felt, at any moment, as though the
bloody tears would break from him again as he dwelt on his deepest agony.  She
would be a lost memory, a faded dream.

 
“They will clean me,” he shook, choking on his words.  “She will never have
existed.  Everything …  It will all be forgotten.”

  
“The soul never forgets,” said the hermit. “You carry her light now.”

  
“I want to die,” he said.  “I should have died long ago.”  He looked up
desperately.  “Is there any way,” he pled, “any way I might remember?”

  
“As long as you live, there is always Providence, so long as you believe.”