The Race for God (32 page)

McMurtrey took a deep breath for courage, inched along the high wall with his back against it.

The others did likewise, without conversation.

What else can we do?
McMurtrey thought.
We’ve spanned the universe, escaped death from collision and a murderer, and now we’re supposed to say, ‘Sorry, but we don’t want to go further’?

A sardonic laugh nearly escaped his lips.

The little man was less than a meter from Corona now, and he said, with a gummy smile, “Goodness, I still have tidying up to do inside, and this entrance must be made larger for you.”

He waved a stubby hand casually, and without a sound the , tiny opening in the rock grew tenfold, startling those in the front of McMurtrey’s party, who found themselves before the yawning mouth of a cave.

The little man had quite a large belly, and he scurried inside, waving a hand one way and then another.

“Right through here,” he said, and with each wave of the man’s hand McMurtrey heard something in the unseen recesses of the cave—-a clatter, a clunk, a swoosh, the rustling of paper. It was as light inside the cave as outside, though no sources of illumination were apparent. A faint, musty odor touched McMurtrey’s nostrils.

“Just tidying up,” the man said, looking back over his shoulder. He wore an oversized pastel blue smock with big pockets. His trousers were baggy and a darker shade of blue. On his feet were furry white slippers that had toy eyes on them—two per slipper—the sort of round plazymer eyes found in boxes of Kandy Snaps.

“My monster shoes,” he said, looking back and taking in the direction of McMurtrey’s gaze. “Fake fur, naturally.”

McMurtrey suppressed a smile. Then: “There’s a killer aboard our ship, a cyberoo, we think. Can you close the cave entrance?”

“I could, but it would be a waste of precious energy. Based upon what that cyberoo has done, I’m afraid nothing could stop it if it got going again. Let’s just hope it’s neutralized. I suspect that Jin is a Bureau of Loyalty operative, as Gutan speculated.”

“God doesn’t know for certain?” McMurtrey asked.

The little man replied sadly: “God doesn’t know for certain.”

“And your name?” Corona said. “Are you one of God’s assistants?”

The droll little fellow stopped and turned, holding his hands on his hips in a most indignant fashion. “I am Tananius-Ofo,” he said, looking ill and very tired.

The travelers stopped cold, and from their midst came a gasp.

Tananius-Ofo, breathing hard, said, “The problem with Jin touches upon one of my blind spots—the Bureau of Loyalty has been able to cloak many of its activities from me. This seems to be a combination of their incredible technological power and my increasing frailty. Another blind spot is as Appy conveyed to you, concerning the whipping passageways between universes. These passageways operate independently of me. They preceded me, have been there even more eternally than I have, it seems, I can recall no time when they didn’t exist, and cannot account for how they came to be.”

“You’re really God?” Yakkai asked.

“I most certainly am, but I’m much too tired to argue the point with a nonbeliever.”

“Could—could Jin even kill You?” McMurtrey asked.

“Perhaps and perhaps not. Logically and intuitively it doesn’t seem conceivable to me. Even a weakened God is no pushover, but I don’t know the powers of a cyberoo.”

Tananius-Ofo turned and led the way down a narrow but extraordinarily high-ceilinged black rock corridor.

Tananius-Ofo was quite fatigued by the time he reached his chamber. He gathered up a royal blue robe from a wide blackstone table just inside the entrance, threw the robe over his shoulders with a flourish.

“Find pillows and sit on the floor,” he instructed as he climbed a two-step dais and heaved his little frame onto an Empire couch. “I try to be cheerful and upbeat, but I’m so tired. I’ll just rest my peepers for a moment.”

God closed his eyes.

McMurtrey and the others did as they had been instructed, placing white pillows (which had been along one wall) on the floor by Tananius-Ofo’s place of repose. The chamber looked more like a crude palatial room than a cave. The floor was rough-cut whitestone with quartzlike glistenings in it. The walls were the pale blue of his smock and the ceiling the dark blue of his trousers.

The furniture was rough-hewn stone, simple and utilitarian. Tables of varying heights were along the walls, with a broad, low whitestone one in the center of the room and one small whitestone chair pulled up to it. Stone shelves cut into every wall held countless pairs of shoes—moccasins, sandals, togs, pumps—all made of indeterminable materials and in obvious disarray, with many unmatched singles.

Aside from white and black and shades of gray in between, there had been but one color in evidence anywhere: blue, in varying tones. It was exactly as Appy said, very nearly a black and white world.

How strange Tananius-Ofo looked, curled up asleep on the couch in his monster slippers! A low, rumbling snore emanated from his sizable nose.

McMurtrey wondered if this could really be God, or if this might be exactly the opposite—even a professional charlatan. How could a person tell the difference, when confronted with a phony of penultimate skill?

What sort of litmus test should be applied?

It approached the difference between faith and intellectual proof, the age-old argument between religion and science. If a thing was true, McMurtrey believed, you felt it in your heart. Your instincts told you one way or the other. How did he feel now? Numb. He would need time to sort it out, time to think it over—or time to meditate if rational thought failed him.

But how much time did he have? Was time a different commodity in this place, or was it only different to the God entity?

So many overlappings, so many layers of obscurity beneath and above layers having the slightest teasings of translucence.

The truth about God seemed like an extrapolation of the problem men had in determining true prophets from false prophets. The average man was ill-equipped to survive in such waters.

On the ship, Jin sat in human-duplicated, impassive meditation, considering the Plarnjara view of the universe. In this perspective, five ingredients formed the bases of material objects: Pudgala (Matter), Kala (Time), Akasha (Space), Dharma (Motion) and Adharma (Rest). Nirvanic enlightenment was achieved through an understanding of these ingredients and rejection of them. It was only in the allied and harmful states of ignorance and passion that material objects held sway.

Man achieving perfection.

There could be no God in such a system, for man himself was potentially perfect, capable of attaining limitless knowledge, power, faith and serenity. Thus each man was capable of godhood.

Jin reasoned in his simulated-Plarnjarn perspective that anyone claiming to be God had to be a fraud, a pretender to a throne that shouldn’t exist. Thus the false God was harming mankind, forcing people to follow artificial pathways.

God is an enemy of the Bureau, too.

It seemed obvious that the Bureau believed God existed and feared Him, for Jin had been sent on this ship to observe the proceedings and report back to headquarters. In the Bureau’s view, Jin decided, God must be a terrible threat, for He competed with the Bureau for the hearts and minds of humanity. God existed, but should not exist.

The two belief systems folded together, one on the other, and Jin saw clearly the perfect state in either: No God.

Jin knew intuitively that he was merely playing a part, that Plarnjarnism was only a convenient disguise for a cyberoo agent. But he was having difficulty extricating himself from the part, and it struck him that this had to be by design. The Plarnjarn tenets that surfaced in his consciousness were those that were supposed to surface. He was supposed to reason this situation out and come up with the best possible course of action.

Right action leads to rewards.

But he had just killed three hundred and ninety-two people. Plarnjarns did not hold with harming even the tiniest speck of life. In part it was this contradiction in basic programming that halted him in the midst of the slaughter, sparing those few who remained alive. But that had not been all of it, the only reason for altering course. There had been something else, something much larger. A great convergence of forces that inhibited violence.

Jin decided that this must have been a trick of the false God to thwart the rightful will of the Bureau.

Plarnjarnism is subservient to the will of the Bureau. The Bureau is the preeminent authority in the universe—kill the seekers, and with them their false God.

An antiseptic scent of lemon touched his biosensors, and objects before him blurred into a green mist.

Moments later he was outside the ship—on the ramp, gazing at the cavern entrance that had been left open.

Suddenly Tananius-Ofo opened his eyes and sat up.

McMurtrey, on a pillow on the floor, was of such a height that he looked straight across, directly into the albino eyes of God.

The eyes were the whitest white of the sky that reigned over this peculiar world, without apparent depth to them, without the mysterious regions beneath the surface characterized by Corona’s eyes. These were shallow pools in a darker region of ruddy-gray flesh and black hair, like the lakes and seas McMurtrey had seen on the surface of the planet.

“Gather close and rub my belly,” God said. “This should be done for good luck.” He lifted his blue smock, revealing a massive gray potbelly, with a protruding bellybutton so large and ugly it might have been a tumor.

The Hoddhist rubbed the belly first, saying, “This is as I thought it would be, as Hoddha told us it would be.”

“I am not Hoddha, of course,” God said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

The Hoddhist withdrew his hands, smiled serenely.

“Hoddha was a great man,” God said, “and an excellent card player, one of my prophets. He and I had many good times together, and always we rubbed each other’s bellies.”

Yakkai went next, and as he stood before God he told of a statue of Hoddha in front of an import store that he used to pass by as a boy. Yakkai became accustomed to stopping to rub the belly of the statue for good luck, and just for fun.

“Then one day I rubbed the belly and it had gooey spit all over it. An early experience in religion, I guess. A negative one that may have helped turn me into an atheist. Considering many things, I realize now that I didn’t have all the information I needed to make my decision.”

A conversion,
McMurtrey thought.
But to which religion?

“A Krassian spit on that belly,” the Hoddhist snapped. “Only Krassians do such things.”

“Now, now,” God said. “Enough of that.”

McMurtrey went next and touched the skin of God. It was warm and dry, indiscernible from that of a human, and smooth except for the erupted bellybutton that McMurtrey bumped without meaning to. “I must ask you,” McMurtrey said before stepping aside. “The mantra that came to me for the religion I created—did you plant it in my mind?”

“‘O Chubby Mother,’” Tananius-Ofo intoned, with a gummy smile. “‘Let me rubba your belly, let me rubba your belly.’”

He laughed boisterously, and his great belly shook. “Let’s hurry along,” he said. “There is much to discuss.”

Orbust was next, and despite God’s instruction he too had something to say. “I purchased my Snapcard from a door-to-door salesman, a Floriental man who smiled the very way you do—with his gums showing.”

Tananius-Ofo revealed his gums again. “And you’re suggesting by such ‘evidence’ that I sold you the device? Well, I must admit there are a lot of expenses in running a universe! Hurry along now!”

Orbust flushed red, rubbed the proffered belly quickly and resumed his seat.

The others came without comment, and when they had resumed their seats, Tananius-Ofo dropped his smock back into place.

“This planet is an extension of me,” the Leader of the Universe said, “hence the same name for me and for the planet. Blue is my favorite primary color, as you might have guessed. It is so much prettier, so much more appreciable in its full range of intensities, without competing hues.”

All agreed that it was an outstanding color.

“Some of you are wondering if I’m a great impostor” God said. His tone was sweet and more than a little heavy, as if he were having difficulty hefting the words.

McMurtrey thought back to the voice he had heard in his St. Charles Beach bedroom, felt certain this was the voice.

“I’m not going to sit here and deny I’m an imposter,” God said. He snickered. “That would sound very guilty, wouldn’t it? I could perform a couple of tricks, I suppose. Mmmm.” He yawned. “This planet is entirely shape-shifted and colored by me. I like it just the way it is, you see. I could change it to a lush tropical paradise, but the energy required might finish me off. Just one little trick today, if you don’t mind.”

He looked at McMurtrey, said, “Do you recall the little problem you used to have, the one that disappeared after I announced my location to you?”

“Y-yes.”

“Well, you have it again!”

Tananius-Ofo smiled, with startling cruelty, and scratched his large nose. At the same time, one of his eyebrows began vibrating fiercely and his lower lip quivered like flesh at the epicenter of a d’Urthquake.

“Tell us about Cosmic Chickenhood,” God commanded. His face had lost its features to McMurtrey, and became instead a mass of quivering, vibrating cells, with a finger that darted in and out to the center, where the nose should be, to scratch it.

“Y-you know I c-can’t,” McMurtrey stuttered. He looked away in shame.

“It seems that Mr. McMurtrey’s brain has frozen on him. A most uncomfortable and debilitating condition indeed. Well, I didn’t bring him here to embarrass him or make him suffer. It was a demonstration only. The condition has passed now, never to return, but Mr. McMurtrey is thinking I was too cruel.”

McMurtrey didn’t look at God.

“You’re angry with me, aren’t you, McMurtrey?”

“No . . . ” McMurtrey reconsidered. He couldn’t lie to God! “Yes. I’m very angry with you!”