The Godmakers

Chapter Twenty-Nine

The street of the Abbod proved to be even narrower than the others. Orne strode down it, observing that he could stretch out both arms and touch the opposed walls. They were rough stone illuminated by widely spaced glowglobes of ancient design, all black plasteel curlicues around the globes. A door glowed dimly gray at the end of the alley. The area smelled of newly turned earth and fungus. The plastrete surface underfoot was dishmarked with the passage of feet.

The Abbod’s door proved to be locked.

Orne thought: A locked door? Can all be sweetness and purity on Amel? He stepped back, peered up at the wall. Dark irregularities atop it suggested spikes or a similar barrier. Orne’s thoughts turned cynical: Such civilized appointments on this peaceful planet.

There was violence in this place beyond the ravening of mobs. Narrow alleys were easy to defend. Men who knew how to give sharp orders knew how to give military orders. The trappings of psi and a constant harping on peace betrayed a concern with massive violence.

A concern with war.

Orne glanced back up the alley. It remained empty. He sensed the urgency of the fear within him. A dead-end street could live up to its label. He wanted to leave this place as fast as his feet would take him. This thought brought him no relief from the internal signal. One place was as dangerous as another on this planet. There was no way out of it except to plunge through the danger.

He took a deep breath, shed the priestly robe, swung a hemmed corner up onto the wall, pulled. The robe slipped, caught. He tested it, heard a small tearing sound, but the fabric held. Orne tried his weight on it. The robe stretched, but remained firmly caught atop the wall.

Scrabbling sounds marked his passage up the stones. He avoided sharp spikes at the top, crouched there to survey his surroundings. One window on the top floor of the two-story building opposite him glowed with a dim rose light behind loose draperies. Orne glanced down, saw a courtyard, tall pots in rows topped with flowering bushes. He glanced once more at the lighted window, felt the abrupt stab of rejection.

Danger there!

An air of tension filled the courtyard. The shadows could hold an army of guards, but an inner sense told him the danger lay in some other source.

Behind that window.

Orne freed the robe from the spike, dropped into the courtyard, crouched in shadows while he slipped back into the garment. Fastening the belt, he worked his way around the yard to the left, avoided the pots, hugged the shadows.

Vines dropped from a balcony below the lighted window. He tested one and it came away in his hands. Too fragile. He moved farther along the wall of the house. A draft fanned his left cheek. He paused, peered into darker blackness: an open doorway.

Warning fear tingled along his nerves. He put it down, slipped through the doorway into a stairwell. Light flared in the stairwell!

Orne froze, then suppressed laughter as he saw the beam switch beside the doorway. He stepped backward: darkness; forward: light.

The stairs climbed in a curve to the left. Orne moved up them, drifting silently, found a door at the top with a single golden initial: A.

The Abbod? The door handle was a simple short bar on a pivot. No palm-code lock or other device. Anyone could open it.

Orne felt the dryness of his throat as he put a hand to the short bar, depressed it. A faint click sounded. Orne threw the door open, lunged through and slammed it behind him.

“Ahhh, I have been expecting you.” It was a faintly tenor masculine voice with an edge of quavering to it.

Orne slued around, saw a wide hooded bed. Remote in the bed like a dark-skinned doll sat a man in a white nightshirt. He lay propped against a mound of pillows, the face faintly familiar. It was narrow and with a nose like a precipice over a wide mouth. The polished dark baldness of the head gleamed in the faint light of a single glowglobe beside the bed.

The wide mouth moved and the faintly quavering tenor voice said: “I am the Abbod Halmyrach. I welcome you and bless you.”

An odor of age and dust dominated the room. Orne heard an ancient timepiece ticking somewhere in the shadows.

He took two steps toward the figure in the bed. His prescient sense increased its warning pressure. He paused, placing the familiarity of the Abbod’s face. “You look like a man I know as Emolirdo.”

“My younger brother,” the Abbod said. “Does he still insist on explaining that his name stands for Agony?”

Orne nodded.

“That’s a small attempt at humor, you know,” the Abbod said. “His name is really Aggadah, which refers to the maxims and such in the Talmud. That’s a very ancient religious book.”

“You said you were expecting me,” Orne said.

“I normally expect the ones I summon,” the Abbod said. His eyes seemed to peer through Orne, searching, probing. One skeletal arm lifted, gestured toward a simple chair beside the bed. “Please be seated. Forgive me for receiving you in this fashion, but I find myself jealous of my rest in these latter years. You found my brother in good health when you last saw him?”

“Yes, he seemed healthy.”

Orne crossed to the chair, wondering about the Abbod. Something about this frail-appearing and skinny ancient spoke of powers beyond anything Orne had ever before encountered.

Deadly forces lay dormant in this room. He glanced around, saw dark hangings on the walls, weird shapes worked upon them—curves and squares, pyramids, swastikas, a repetitive symbol like an anchor fluke.

The floor felt cold and hard. Orne looked down, saw black and white tiles in large pentagonal pieces. Each was at least a meter across. Polished wood furniture stood in the shadowy corners. He identified a desk, a low table, chairs, a visorecord rack with lyre sides.

“Have you summoned your guards?” Orne asked, turning his attention back to the Abbod.

“What need have I of guards?” the Abbod asked. “When a thing is guarded, that creates the need for guards.”

Again, the skeletal arm gestured toward the chair. “Please be seated. It disturbs me to see you so uncomfortable.”

Orne studied the chair. It was a spindly thing without arms to conceal secret bindings.

“It is just a chair,” the Abbod said.

Orne sat down like a man plunging into cold water, tensed his muscles to leap.

Nothing happened.

The Abbod smiled. “You see?”

Orne wet his lips with his tongue. The air in the room bothered him. It felt deficient to his lungs. Something extremely out of place here. It was not going as he had imagined, but as he reflected upon this, he couldn’t think how he had imagined this meeting. It just wasn’t right.

“You have had a very trying time,” the Abbod said. “It was necessary for the most part, but please share my fellow feeling. I well recall how it was for me.”

“Oh? Did you come here to find out some things, too?”

“In a sense,” the Abbod said. “In a very real sense.”

“Why’re you trying to destroy the I-A?” Orne blurted. “That’s what I want to find out.”

“A challenge does not necessarily imply the wish to destroy,” the Abbod said. “Have you deciphered the intent behind your ordeal? Do you know why you cooperated with us in this perilous testing?” The large eyes, brown and glossy, peered innocently at Orne.

“What else could I do?”

“Many things, as you’ve just demonstrated.”

“All right… I was curious.”

“About what specifically?”

Orne felt something quicken within him, lowered his eyes. As he reacted, Orne wondered at himself. What am I hiding?

The Abbod said: “Are you being honest with yourself?”

Orne swallowed. He felt like a small boy called to account by his schoolmaster. He said: “I try to be. I… believe I continued because I suspected you might be teaching me things about myself that… I didn’t already know.”

“Superb,” the Abbod breathed. “But you’re a product of the Marakian civilization which…”

“And the Nathian,” Orne interrupted.

“To be sure,” the Abbod said. “And this civilization boasts of many techniques for the human to know himself—reconditioning, sophisticated microsurgical resources, the enforced application of acultural toning. How could there be anything about yourself that you still needed to know?”

“I just… knew there was.”

“Why? How?”

“There’s always something more we need to know about anything. That’s the way it is in an infinite universe.”

“A rare insight,” the Abbod said. “Have you ever been afraid without knowing precisely why?”

“Who hasn’t?”

“Indeed,” the Abbod agreed. “You speak the words, but I do not believe you act upon your insight. Ahhhh, if we only had the time to enroll you in the study of thaumaturgical psychiatry and the ancient Christians.”

“Enroll me in what?”

“There were mental sciences long before the techniques developed by your civilization,” the Abbod said. “The Christeros religion preserves many fragments of such techniques. You would find such study valuable.”

Orne shook his head. This wasn’t going the way it should. He felt defensive, outmaneuvered. Yet, all he faced was one skinny human in a ridiculous nightshirt.

No…

Orne corrected himself. He faced much more than that. The sense of power here could not be ignored.

The Abbod said: “Do you really believe you came here to protect your precious I-A, to discover if we were fomenting war?”

“That has to be part of the reason,” Orne said.

“And what if you discovered that we were planning a war? What then? Are you the surgeon? Are you prepared to cut out the infection and leave society in its former health?”

Orne felt a flare of anger which receded as quickly as it had come. Health? The concept bothered him. What was health?

“All around us,” the Abbod said, “Shadowy forces exist. Now and again they break through the encrusting dimensions, and they coalesce into forms tangible enough that we are aware of them. You are aware of such forces right now. If we view them from the viewpoint of life, some of these forces are healthy, some unhealthy. There are ways in which life can speak to these forces, but our communications do not always produce the results we anticipate.”

Silently, Orne stared at the Abbod, aware with a ringing sense of hollowness that they had embarked on a perilous course. He felt forces surging within him, wild and terrible.

The Abbod said: “Do you not see parallels between the things we have thus far discussed?”

“I…” Orne gulped. “Maybe.”

“The best of a supremely mechanistic scientific society weighed you, Orne, and assigned you a niche in its scheme of things. Does that niche fit you?”

“You know it doesn’t.”

“Something remained in you,” the Abbod said, “which your civilization could not touch; just as there always remains something which your I-A does not touch.”

Orne felt a lump in his throat, thought of Gienah, of Hamal and Sheleb. He said: “Sometimes we touch too much.”

“Of course,” the Abbod agreed. “But most of every iceberg remains beneath its sea. Thus it is with Amel. Thus it is with you, with the I-A, with every manifestation we can recognize.”

Again, Orne felt the surge of anger. “These are just words,” he muttered. “Nothing but words!”

The Abbod closed his eyes, sighed. He spoke softly: “The Guru Pasawan, who led the Ramakrishnanas into the Great Unification which we now know as the Ecumenical Truce, taught the divinity of the soul, the unity of all existence, the oneness of the Godhead, the harmony of all religions, the inexorable flow of eternity…”

“I’ve had enough religious pap!” Orne snapped. “You forget: I’ve been through some of your machines. I know how you manipulate the…”

“Consider this in the nature of a history lesson,” the Abbod murmured, opening his glistening eyes to stare at Orne.

Orne fell silent, abashed at his emotional outburst. Why had he done that? What pressures were concealed here?

“The discovery and interpretation of psi tends to confirm the Guru Pasawan,” the Abbod said. “Thus far, our postulates remain secure.”

“Oh?” And Orne wondered at this; surely, the Abbod wasn’t going to venture a scientific proof of religion!

The Abbod said: “All of mankind acting together represents a great psi force, an energy system. The temporary words are unimportant because the observable fact remains. Sometimes, we call this force religion. Sometimes, we invest it with an independent focus of action which we call God.”

“Psi focus!” Orne blurted. “Emolirdo implied I might be… well, he said…”

“A god?” the Abbod asked.

Orne saw the old man’s hands trembling like leaves on the bedcovers. The prescient fear was gone, but he didn’t think he enjoyed the surge of internal forces that remained.

“That’s what he said,” Orne agreed.

“We have learned,” the Abbod said, “That a god without discipline faces the same fate in our dimensions as the merest human confronted with the same circumstances. It is unfortunate that humankind has always been so attracted to absolutes—even in our gods.”

Orne recalled his experience with Bakrish on the hillside, the mob, the psi forces surging from that massed organism of humanity.

The Abbod said: “You speak with a certain glibness of eternity, of absolutes. Let us turn to finite existence instead. Let us consider a finite system in which a given being—even a god—might exhaust all avenues of knowledge, and know everything, as it were.”

Orne saw the image painted by the Abbod’s words, blurted: “It’d be worse than death!”

“An unutterable and deadly boredom would face such a being,” the Abbod agreed. “The future would be an endless repetition, the replaying of all its old records. It would be, as you say, a boredom worse than extinction.”

“But boredom’s a kind of stasis,” Orne said. “That’d break down somewhere and explode into chaos.”

“And where do we poor finite creatures make our existence?” the Abbod asked.

“Surrounded by chaos,” Orne said.

“Immersed in it,” the Abbod said, his old eyelids fluttering. “We live in an infinite system where anything can happen, a place of constant change. Our one absolute: Things change.”

“If anything can happen,” Orne said, “your hypothetical being could be extinguished. Even a god?”

“Quite a price to pay to escape boredom, eh?” the Abbod asked.

“It can’t be that simple,” Orne protested.

“And probably isn’t,” the Abbod agreed. “Another consciousness exists within us which denies extinction. It has been called such things as collective unconscious, the paramatman, Urgrund, Sanatana Dharma, supermind, ober palliat. It has been called many things.”

“Words again,” Orne objected. “The fact that a name exists for something doesn’t mean that thing exists.”

“Good,” the Abbod said. “You do not mistake clear reasoning for correct reasoning. You are an empiricist. Have you ever heard the legend of Doubting Thomas?”

“No.”

“Ahhh,” the Abbod said, “Then a mortal may instruct a god. Thomas is one of my favorite characters. He refused to take crucial facts on faith.”

“He sounds like a wise man.”

“I have always so considered him,” the Abbod said. “He questioned, but he failed to question far enough. Thomas never asked whom the gods worship.”

Orne felt his inner being turned over—one slow revolution. He sensed forces falling into place, concepts, order, chaos, new relationships. It was an explosion of awareness, a blinding light that illuminated infinity for him.

When it passed, he said: “You did not instruct Mahmud.”

“We did not,” the Abbod said, his voice low and sad. “Mahmud escaped us. We may generate gods… prophets, but we are not always in a healthy relationship with them. When they point out the pathways to degeneracy and failure, we may not listen. When they indicate the way out of our blindness, veils fall upon our sight. The results are ever the same.”

Orne spoke, hearing his own voice echo with a terrible resonance in the Abbod’s room: “And even when you follow the way, you achieve only temporary order. You climb toward power and fall into shattering circumstances.”

An inner light glowed from the Abbod’s glossy eyes. He said: “I pray to you, Orne. Have you any count on the number of helpless innocents tortured and maimed in the name of religion during our bloody history?”

“The number is meaningless,” Orne said.

“Why do religions run wild?” the Abbod asked.

“Do you know what happened to me out there tonight?” Orne demanded.

“I knew within minutes of your escape,” the Abbod said. “I pray you not to be angry. Remember, I am the one who summoned you.”

Orne stared at the Abbod, seeing not the flesh but the forces which came to focus there as though pouring through a torn place in a black curtain. “You wanted me to experience and learn the explosive energy within religion,” he said. “Truly, a mortal may instruct a god.” He hesitated. “Or a prophet. You please me, Abbod Hahnyrach.”

Tears poured from the Abbod’s eyes. He said: “Which are you, Orne: god or prophet?”

Orne silenced sensory perception, examined the new relationships, then: “Either, or both… or none of these. One has a choice. I accept your challenge. I will not start a wild new religion.”

“Then what will you do?” the Abbod whispered.

Orne turned, waved a hand. A dancing sword of flame came into being about two meters from his outstretched hand. He aimed its point at the Abbod’s head, saw fear glisten in the old eyes.

“What happened to the first lonely human who tapped this form of energy?” Orne demanded.

“He was burned alive for sorcery,” the Abbod husked. “He did not know how to use the force after calling it into existence.”

“Then it is dangerous to call a force into existence without knowing how to use it,” Orne said. “Do you know what this particular force was called?”

“A salamander,” the Abbod whispered.

“Men thought it was a demon with a life of its own,” Orne said. “But you know more about it than that, don’t you, Reverend Abbod?”

“It’s raw energy,” the Abbod whispered. He drew in a ragged breath, sank back against his pillows.

Orne observed the lapse, infused the Abbod with additional energy.

“Thank you,” the Abbod said. “Sometimes I forget my years, but they do not forget me.”

“You forced me to accept the things I already could do,” Orne said. “I doubted the existence of a superior consciousness which sometimes manifests itself in men, in gods, prophets and machines. But you gave me the test of faith and forced me to have faith in myself.”

“It is thus gods are made,” the Abbod ventured.

Orne recalled the old nightmare—“Gods are made, not born.”

He said: “You should have listened to Thomas. Gods do worship. I summoned Mahmud and Mahmud was not of your making. I caused pain and suffering. In an infinite universe, a god may hate,”

The old man put his hands over his face, moaned: “Ohhh, what have we done? What have we done?”

Orne said: “Psi must be faced with psi.”

By willing it, Orne projected himself into space and alternate dimensions, found a place where psi forces did not distract. Somewhere, there was a great howling of non-sound, but he could ignore it. The thought of blazing seconds ticked within him. TIME!

He juggled symbols like blocks of energy, manipulated energy like discrete signals.

Time and tension: Tension equals energy source. Energy plus opposition equals growth of energy.

To strengthen a thing, oppose it. Growth of energy plus opposition produces (time/time) produces new identities.

Orne whispered soundlessly to TIME. “You become like the worst in what you oppose.”

TIME displayed it for him: The great degenerated into the small, priest slipped into evil…

Somewhere beyond him, Orne sensed chaotic energy flowing. It was a great blankness filled with ceaseless flowing. He felt himself on a mountaintop and there was a mountaintop beneath him. He pressed the living earth with flattened palms.

Thus I have shape, he thought.

A voice came to him from below the mountain. He was being pulled down the mountain, distorted, twisted. Orne resisted the distortion, allowed himself to flow toward the voice. “Blessed is Orne; blessed is Orne…”

It was a persistent chant in the Abbod’s voice. There were others then—Diana, Stetson… a multitude.

“Blessed is Orne…”

Orne saw with senses he created for the purpose, and into dimensions of his own making. Still, he sensed the flowing chaos, knowing that even this might not hold him. One had only to make the proper perception. Veils would fall away.

“Blessed is Orne,” the Abbod prayed.

Orne felt a pang of sympathy for the old man, recognized the awe. It was like Emolirdo’s aborted demonstration—a three-dimensional shadow cast into a two-dimensional universe. The Abbod existed in a thin layer of time. Life projected the Abbod’s matter along that thin dimension.

The Abbod prayed to his God Orne and Orne answered, coming down from the mountaintop, erasing the worship of the multitudes, coming to rest as a physical form cross-legged and seated upon the bed.

“Once again you summon me,” Orne said.

“You have not said which you choose,” the Abbod said. “God, prophet… or what?”

“It’s interesting,” Orne said. “You exist within these dimensions, yet outside them. I have seen your thoughts blaze through a lifetime, taking only a second for the journey. When you are threatened, your awareness retreats into no-time; you force time almost to a standstill.”

The Abbod still sat propped up in bed, but now he held his hands extended prayerfully. He said: “I pray that you answer my question.”

“You already know the answer,” Orne said.

“I?” the Abbod’s eyes opened wide in surprise. The thin old shanks trembled in the bed.

“You have known it for thousands of years,” Orne said. “I have seen this. Before men first ventured into space, some were looking at the universe in the right way and learning to answer such questions. They called it Maya. The tongue was called Sanskrit.”

“Maya,” the Abbod whispered. “I project my consciousness upon the universe.”

“Life creates its own motive,” Orne said. “We project our own reason for being. And always ahead of us—the great cataclysm and the great awakening. Always ahead of us—the great burning time from which the phoenix arises. The faith we have is the faith we create.”

“How does that answer my question?” the Abbod pleaded.

“I choose that which any god would choose,” Orne said.

And he disappeared from the Abbod’s bedroom.