The Race for God (28 page)

“Mr. Singh,” Corona said, in her loudest voice, “please remove Yakkai from the room! We can’t have any more of this!”

Singh lifted Yakkai rudely to his feet, dragged him toward the corridor door.

“We are not without ties to history!” Yakkai yelled. “We are the culmination of the sins of organized religion over centuries, just as Gutan is the culmination of all that is vile in man. Who are you to judge Gutan? How can you pass judgment upon him when your sins are just as great? This proceeding is a farce!”

Singh dragged the offender from the room, closing the door behind them.

“We can’t go into all of that here,” Corona said, with a tight smile. “As for suffering, I’m sorry I was forced to bring it up. Haven’t we suffered enough for it?”

Laughter roiled through the great room.

Corona stopped, and her face flushed bright red. Capricious laughter came from her mouth, Appy’s laughter.

“I don’t like this,” Corona said. “I’m suspecting now that Appy put us on the track of suffering as a demented joke, that I didn’t gain as much control over Appy as I thought I did, that he’s playing possum. Maybe I should step down.”

“What about this trial?” McMurtrey asked.

“We came up with it,” Orbust said. “Not Appy.”

“But it was Corona who said we had to deal with the matter of Gutan before the ship would restart,” McMurtrey said, “and she got that data from Appy’s program.”

McMurtrey caught Corona’s gaze. She appeared confused, not angry with him for his words.

“I think the discussion of suffering was appropriate,” Feek the Afsornian said, “and that Gutan must be dealt with. Maybe the question should be: ‘How can we as human beings reduce the suffering of our fellow man?’ Can any of you call upon your God to bring an immediate end to suffering?”

The room became silent.

“I thought not. It is up to us, therefore, up to all of mankind. We should have no excuses for the pain we inflict upon other humans and other life forms. Suffering has become an eternal, senseless thing. Perhaps we have the opportunity now to reverse the tide. Perhaps—”

“All right you bastards, I have a bomb!” It was Yakkai bursting back into the room, with Singh a distance behind him, sword drawn.

“It’s in my pocket!” Yakkai screamed. “And I’ll blow all of you to Hell! That’ll end your suffering!” He ran to a side wall, held his hand in one bulging pocket.

“He’s as crazy as Gutan, Corona and Appy!” a woman screeched. “May God have mercy upon our souls!”

From all around, holy men jumped to their feet, drawing swords and guns.

“No violence,” Corona yelled. “Yakkai doesn’t have a bomb. Appy scanned every boarder, made a computer record of every weapon. Yakkai is disturbed. He’s bluffing.”

“I don’t have a lot of confidence in that information,” Orbust said, just loudly enough for nearby judges to hear him.

“I made the bomb after I boarded,” Yakkai said. His gaze skittered around the room from face to face, locked onto Nanak Singh. “Keep him away from me! If I take my hand off the activator, it blows! Anyone tries to shoot me, it blows!”

Zatima motioned for Singh to step back, and he did, keeping his sword drawn.

“Assuming you have a bomb,” McMurtrey said, “why would you want to blow us up?”

“Why not? What difference would it make? The explosion wouldn’t even be a blip on the screen of the universe.” Yakkai positioned himself apart from the others, defensively, with his back against a wall.

“Maybe you’re right about a lot of things,” McMurtrey offered, “about God’s weakness, about meaningless suffering. But what if this journey of ours could make a difference? You’re obviously a sensitive man, Shalom ben Yakkai. I ask you, I ask everyone here, to give this venture a chance,”

“What venture?” Gutan asked. “You haven’t decided what to do with me.”

“We have eleven hours, twenty minutes,” Corona said, eyeing her Wriskron. “If everyone agrees, I’d like Mr. Gutan to finish his story.”

Yakkai looked edgy.

“I’m sure he’s bluffing,” Corona said to Zatima, her voice low.

The trial continued, while Yakkai became silently alert, watching everyone he considered a threat.

Gutan’s skin had a sickly, slimy sheen to it as he spoke nervously and haltingly for another hour, filling McMurtrey with the image of a life wasted, with hardly any socially acceptable deeds. It was damning information from a man testifying in the climactic event of his life, his own trial. Did Gutan want to die, didn’t he care, or was it as he said, a compulsion to tell the truth?

He’s sweating Evil, McMurtrey decided. An Evil that oozes from his pores.

Gutan finished with a graphic account of his tryst at Santa Quininas with the corpse of the massive, pendulous-breasted woman.

All the while, McMurtrey’s brain spun with the punishments he might recommend. Surely such sinister acts could not go unpunished, by any stretch of imagination. He felt sick to his stomach, and his gaze flitted between the accused, Singh and Yakkai.

For an instant, the gazes of McMurtrey and Yakkai locked, and Yakkai’s hand moved just a little out of his pocket, with nothing in the hand. No explosion occurred, and as Yakkai slipped his hand back into the pocket he winked.

McMurtrey glanced around, didn’t see anyone else who had noticed. So Yakkai was bluffing! Yakkai had stolen precious time from the trial, for a purpose he probably couldn’t explain himself. Maybe he did it to get free of Singh, so he could return to the trial. At least he was quieter now.

What an assortment,
McMurtrey thought.
No wonder we’ve fallen out of the race.

Finally Gutan spoke his last, and there were no more questions.

Corona ordered that Gutan remain in place while she and the other judges retired to Assembly Room B-2 to arrive at their decisions.

Yakkai remained where he was by the wall, without a word.

The judges sat in a row, on the side of the assembly room facing the window. This gave McMurtrey a distraction, for he stared into space when he should have been participating in the conversation around him. Outside and covering the expanse of the window were glimmering white balls, with each spaced a meter or so from the other, and these stood in three-dimensional relief against parallel white lines that stretched into infinite space. Between the lines, squinting or not, McMurtrey saw only stars that blinked faintly. Somewhere in that sprinkling of solar systems lay the planet Tananius-Ofo.

Makanji was talking, something about there being no question of Gutan’s guilt.

“Does anyone think the man is innocent?” Makanji asked. “Certainly he did everything he said he did, and I’m inclined to believe him about the girl. I don’t understand how he came to have the girl in his arms or how he traversed the universe, but I don’t think he killed her.”

Zatima and Orbust voiced concurrence, and McMurtrey perceived irony in these two agreeing on anything. The fight with Singh marked an apparent turning point in Orbust’s behavior. Still in his healing packs, he seemed like a different man, quieter and more polite, probably because he felt weaker and less sure of himself without the gun, the chemstrip and the Snapcard. What a humiliating experience the beating must have been!

Makanji again, saying a godless man could only know God in another incarnation.

McMurtrey’s eyesight glazed over, and he recalled the vision he’d had just before the trial, when
in
another dimension he looked into the Nandu’s timeless, pale eyes. What color had the bespectacled eyes been? McMurtrey couldn’t recall, didn’t know that they’d been of any color he could distinguish.

Like a dreamer unable to awaken, he couldn’t find the dimension in which Makanji spoke now. The eye color was in that dimension. . . .

For an instant, McMurtrey perceived himself at the center of everything, at the nexus of all life, of all death, of all matter and all nonmatter. It was a featureless pinpoint of light with dulcet visual harmonies, where McMurtrey bore all of the contents of the universe.

The pinpoint of light twinkled, and in slow motion McMurtrey saw it expand into human form. The form shuddered, became pale aura-yellow and then reshaped to a fetal ball that became a perfect white ball.

McMurtrey’s sensation of self shifted. His eyes stung and he blinked them. Now he saw the white balls outside the window again, and one of them uncurled, back to human form. McMurtrey’s gut jerked, his heart fluttered and he couldn’t catch his breath.

He was looking at an albino of himself, an ungodly creature that stared at him with sightless eyes. It flattened its face against the glass, screamed desperate shapes with its mouth.

“Let me in!”

McMurtrey was outside, looking through the plexwindow at his fat, flesh-warm self. He couldn’t breathe in the rarefied air.

“Break the glass!”

Something shook him. A strong hand on his arm. Corona’s face came into focus, her expression tender and concerned.

“How you doing, Ev?” she whispered.

“Oh, fine. No problem. My mind’s been wandering.”

“Well, keep track of it!” Corona smiled.

“What are you two whispering about?” Feek demanded.

“Nothing,” Corona said, resuming her seat. “Let’s see, we were all agreeing that Gutan is guilty of despicable crimes. No murders, but on balance he’s probably worse than some murderers. Gutan’s own admissions tell us more than any of us want to know. The man makes me sick, and I’d like to strangle him with my own hands.”

McMurtrey felt his breathing and heartbeat resume regularity, and he inhaled deeply.

“Or blow his brains out,” Zatima suggested. “What a worm to lay across our path.”

“What do we do with the son of a bitch?” McMurtrey asked.

Looking sidelong, McMurtrey saw Corona smiling wryly. “We kiss him and ask him to be a good boy from now on,” she said.

“He does seem contrite,” Feek said.

McMurtrey had been entrusted with one seventh of the decision about Gutan’s life, and was angry with himself for daydreaming when he should have been paying attention. His behavior was unconscionable, and seemed to be yet another failing of his mind, like the spells of mental paralysis he used to suffer at the sight of another person’s nervous tics.

The new spells were debilitating to McMurtrey in a different way. Now McMurtrey’s thoughts weren’t paralyzed, weren’t an amorphous, unusable mass. His thoughts were too abundant, too rich and consuming. Was Appy doing this to him?

Through it all, McMurtrey didn’t seem to have missed anything critical in the trial. Gutan had confessed and seemed remorseful for his acts. But what difference did remorse make?

I’m doing it again! What are they discussing? . . . the sentence . . .

“‘Some shall they cause to be put to death,’” Orbust intoned. “We cannot tolerate such failure of virtue.”

“According to our Isammed law of Haria,” Zatima said, “punishments normally only apply if the crime is committed within an Isammed state. Victims, or the families of victims, can take vengeance upon the perpetrator. This situation calls for flexibility, but of a different variety from that suggested by the Afsornian. I have decided to assign a punishment as if Gutan’s acts occurred in an Isammed nation. Death by stoning is appropriate, or by the hurling of available heavy objects at the accused. I will perform the task myself, if no one else has the stomach for what must be done.”

She finished, and McMurtrey realized that he was seated next in line.

The sentence!
McMurtrey thought.
They’re looking at me!
“Death,” McMurtrey said, not very loudly. “By a humane method . . . like lethal injection.”

“There’s a lot of information in data storage about the methods of punishment employed by other cultures and religions,” Corona said. “I’m suspicious of it, but I want to study the data before offering an opinion.”

“I don’t think this trial is the answer at all,” McMurtrey said. “I think if everyone on this ship can cooperate, can work together, we’ll advance closer to God, we’ll reach God! This ship represents D’Urth, our solar system and all of mankind—the whole course of humanity from here on. If we don’t go forward, man doesn’t go forward. If this ship doesn’t get closer to God, man doesn’t get closer to God.”

“But there are other ships coming behind us,” Zatima said, “with more chances aboard each ship.”

“Do we know for certain they’re in flight?” McMurtrey challenged. “What if we’re the only one?”

“I think we should come up with a sentence,” Corona said.

McMurtrey shook his head in annoyance, looked away. He felt betrayed by Corona.

“We can’t take the prisoner’s life,” Makanji said. “Gutan’s actions will force him to seek the suffering of rebirth, into another incarnation. Only when he discovers the purity of nonattachment, when he shuns material objects and pleasures of the flesh, will he be free of worldly suffering.”

“He must not be killed,” Taam the Hoddhist priest agreed. “There will be other incarnations, and one day he will be free of ignorance, free of suffering.”

“What goes around comes around,” Orbust commented. “So we’re addressing suffering, after all. I think Gutan should suffer in this life. Vote for death!”

The Hoddhist shook his head stubbornly.

“It’s three to two favoring death,” Zatima said.

Now Feek gathered his elegant robe and paced as he spoke. “Mr. Gutan killed no kin, so he has committed no crimes worthy of death. He should be banished from the tribe, placed in isolation to spend the rest of his miserable days reflecting upon his antisocial ways. He was never born and his name will never again be uttered.”

Orbust whispered to Zatima, out of McMurtrey’s hearing range.

Zatima’s features darkened, and she glared at Orbust. But she nodded her head in apparent affirmation. Incredibly they not only agreed on certain points, but they were communicating with one another.

“I’m the tie-breaker,” Corona said. “Although any of you can change your votes. Let’s spend a while reviewing alternatives, and hopefully we can agree on something.”

* * *

Jin awoke to the surging green noise of his Duplication program. He heard nothing else, saw nothing else. The headache was no more, but he felt out of synchronization.