The Christian was old. He was fifty, ancient in a world where all were eternally thirty or younger. He had evidently been a child of a strong Christian family, for he had not even received anti-beard elements; the heavy shadow on his face gave him an eerie, seldom-seen metallic look. His teeth were yellow and chipped. His skin was wrinkled. Across his chest and back hung the halves of a sandwich sign. The front said: GOD IS ASHAMED! When the man saw them coming, he executed a small heel-turn to reveal the letters on the back of the sign: HE SHALL COME AGAIN TO JUDGE!
“I can’t understand them,” Hurkos said.
Gnossos smiled a thin smile. “Some day, they will all be gone.”
“But why are there these people?” Sam asked. “Don’t the medics prevent mental infirmities in babies?”
“Well,” the poet said, shortening his giant strides to match the smaller steps of his companions, “the original concept of the empire was complete freedom. Mental infirmities were weeded out, true. As a result, the number of religious people dropped over the years. But one cannot limit another man’s beliefs under a system of complete freedom. Religious persons were allowed to practice their beliefs. Though their children might be born as mentally sound as possible, the parents raised them and passed their own superstitions on to their offspring. The number of religious dwindled. But as long as they procreated — and this is a strong part of their faith, these Christians — they would always have children to indoctrinate, to warp. It’s a pity, certainly. But, after all, they are responsible and it is their life and their child. A man can waste what is his if he so choose. I guess.”
“Know the Word,” the Christian said as they drew abreast of him. He handed Gnossos and Sam pamphlets — yellow paper with red print. They were so wrinkled and tattered that it was evident many people had handed them right back in the past. The short-lived traffic of each pamphlet had worn it severely.
“I’ll take one too,” Hurkos said, holding his hand out.
The Christian made no reply. Hurkos asked again.
“Will you ask this person of tainted blood to cease speaking to me?” the bearded one asked Sam. He was obviously distressed, running his thin, bony hands up and down the edges of the chest sign, toying with little splinters projecting from the edge of the plastic square.
“Tainted blood?”
“They don’t like Mues,” Gnossos explained. “They would never speak to one unless they were dying and needed help. Then, it would be God’s will that they spoke.”
“Why are Mues — tainted?” Sam asked.
“A Mue is not a creation of God, but the work of man,” the Christian snapped. “A Mue is a violation of God’s holy powers of creation.” His eyes gleamed fanatically.
“Prejudice,” Gnossos said. “It’s part of the dogma of every religion — sometimes heavily disguised but always there. Do you know the history of your church, old man?”
The Christian shuffled his feet. He was beginning to feel that it might be best to stay out of an argument with these particular pagans, but his fanatic devotion could not be totally denied. “Of course I do. In the beginning there was—”
“It doesn’t start that far back.” Gnossos laughed. He licked his lips, anxious to launch into the old man. “It doesn’t start with the darkness and the light and the first seven days. It comes along much later. Millennia later. There’s no church until man decides he needs a means of social climbing, something to make him superior to his neighbors. So he forms a church, a religion. By forming it, he can say that he knows what and why God is. He can say he knows the purpose of all things and can, therefore, be a cut above other men.”
“God
Gnossos smiled patronizingly, almost a saint himself — except for the sharp blade that was his tongue. “I doubt that. You’ll pardon me if I sound distrustful, but I doubt that very much. History is simply littered with men who said God had chosen them to be a leader. Most of them fell flat on their faces. Most of them got trampled down and smashed in the flow of Time and History, which are two things bigger than
“False prophets!” the sign-carrier growled.
“So what makes you think Saint Peter wasn’t a false prophet?”
“What he started is still with us.”
“Duration does not prove worth. Wars lasted a damn sight longer than your religion has, but they were finished and done away with because they were not good things. Besides, your faith is just barely with us. It seems Saint Peter’s work is facing the end that war faced.”
Sam made a face, launched into the conversation again. “But why hate Hurkos for not being directly God- created? If God gave men the power to invent and use the Artificial Womb, then He was involved in the creation of the Mues, though—”
“Men usurped the power,” the Christian said.
“But if God is all-powerful, men could not usurp anything of His. Why, He would crush men who tried—”
Gnossos put a hand on Sam’s shoulder. “It is not for this reason that Christians hate Mues. As I said, they have to feel superior. There are so few people they can look down on anymore; the Mue offers a perfect scapegoat. Because he is often abnormal physically — whether it be a detrimental physical difference or a beautiful, functional difference — they have something to feel superior about. ‘I am not like you,’ they say. ‘I am normal. I am whole.’”
A crowd had begun to form around the debate. People strained over one another’s shoulders, trying to hear and get a look at the verbal combatants. This seemed to please Gnossos, but it irritated the Christian.
“And my dear fellow,” Gnossos continued in a friendly tone raised a bit for the benefit of those at the back of the crowd, “do you know who started many of the worst wars in the past three thousand years?”
“Satan’s forces”
“No. God, it should be so simple as you say. No, it was Christians, the very people who preached against war. In—”
The bearded man showed his teeth in what could have been a snarl if he had added sound. “I will not pursue this argument any longer. You are in Satan’s employ.” He moved quickly, pushing at the crowd that had gathered. They hesitated, then parted to let him through. He had, very shortly, been lost in the breast of the night to be suckled by its darkness.
“You don’t imagine you did any good,” Hurkos said as the crowd around them dispersed and they began walking again. “You don’t imagine you got through that bony structure he calls a head, do you?”
“No. But I can’t resist trying. He is unreachable by this time. Besides, even if he doubted his faith, he would not allow himself to give that doubt prominence in this thoughts. He has forsaken concrete eternity via the immortality drugs, and now he has nothing to cling to but the hopes of his religion, the promises of his God.”
“Gives me the shivers,” Sam said.
“This is all getting much too morbid,” Gnossos said. “Let’s find a hotel and settle down. My feet are killing me, and there is no telling how much running we might have to do to catch Sam if he gets another order.”
Breadloaf finished the last morsels of his sandwich, licked his gums to remove the sticky salad dressing, took a long swallow of hot, black coffee, and leaned back in his chair as if it were a womb he was asking to swallow him. The room was dark, for the thing behind the Shield was not a thing for well-lighted rooms. Its details were brought out too fully in light. Blackness allowed merciful obscurity.
He liked to pick out patterns in the explosions of color, choose and name them as a young boy might do with clouds
Alexander Breadloaf III wondered whether his father had sat like this, watching the patterns and trying to make something of them. It was a seeking after order, certainly, that was the purpose of watching them. Had his father sat, his great leonine head bowed in contemplation, his heavy brows run together from the forehead- wrinkling concentration? Had he laced his thick fingers behind his waterfall of white hair and watched — actually studied — the Prisoner of the Shield, as the family had come to speak of it?
He doubted it. His father had been a man of hard work and strenuous action. He had built his father’s small fortune into a very large fortune, an almost incalculable sum of money. When his engineers accidently stumbled
