Below him, he saw ground vehicles moving from the ship toward the port building. The shipment would be in one of them. Brother Shoethai decided to stay where he was for a time. Let the crowd clear away before he went down to the cargo office. There was no hurry. Once Elder Fuasoi had the shipment and distributed it, everyone on the planet would die, but it would take some time. The virus didn’t work for a long time, sometimes. There was no hurry. An hour more or less would make little difference. Shoethai giggled as he sipped at his tea. Then, seeing what the giggle did to his reflection in the window, he stopped and turned slightly away so that he would not be able to see himself anymore.
In his office at the Friary, Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi leaned on his desk, choking down the pain from his belly. The second stomach and gut transplant hadn’t worked any better than the first one, even though the office had scoured the penitents for as close a tissue match as possible. That was the best the doctors could do here on Grass, and even then they’d objected that the donor hadn’t made a free gift of his body prior to getting fatally wounded in the head by (so Elder Fuasoi had informed them) an unfortunate fall from the towers. There were no facilities for cloning body systems on Grass, and while Elder Brother Noazee Fuasoi of Sanctity had sufficient clout to go back to Sanctity and wait while they cloned a gut for him, Jorny Shales the Moldy hadn’t wanted to take the time.
“One would think …” he snarled to himself in a litany that was repeated every time his gut pained him, “one would think the Creator could grant surcease to those of us doing His work.”
“Pardon, Your Emminence?” said Yavi Foosh from his own desk by the window. “Pardon?”
“Nothing,” snarled the Elder. “I’ve got a pain, that’s all. Probably something I ate.”
Though it wasn’t anything he had eaten. It was flesh, that was all. Fallible flesh. Full of stinks and pains and rot. Full of weakness and foolish, ugly appetites and dirty excretions. There would be no flesh in the next creation, not for those who had cleaned up this one. Elder Fuasoi gripped the edge of the desk and sweated, thinking of other times and places as he waited for the cramp to pass.
He had never really been aware of pain until the camp. His name had been Jorny then, a boy of fifteen dragged into the camp with his uncle Shales. One day he had been living with Uncle Shales in the fishing town, going to school, fishing off the pier, going out in the boat when the weather was right, writing love notes to Gerandra Andraws, cute little Gerry with the perky little bottom, wondering if he was old enough to really do something about her. The next day he had been there in the camp, crowded with fifteen other men and boys in one room with no school, no girls, no fishing, and no Uncle Shales.
The people in the camp either had the disease or were close family members of people with the disease. Uncle Shales was dying, they told him. Jorny had to stay in the camp until they found out whether he was going to die, too.
He wanted to see Uncle Shales, but they wouldn’t let him. He sneaked around until he found what building Uncle was in and where his bed was, and then he got up close to the wall, around back. Uncle Shales would open the window a little bit and they’d talk, at night. Uncle Shales told Jorny not to be afraid. Everything that happened, happened for the best, he said. Jorny sat crouched under the window, tears running down his face, trying to keep Uncle from hearing him cry. Then one night Uncle didn’t answer him and the window wasn’t open, so Jorny waited until everyone was asleep and sneaked in. He couldn’t find Uncle Shales. In the bed where Uncle had been was only this thing, this kind of monster, partly bandages, with one eye peering out and a round, raw hole where its mouth ought to be, leaking all over the place and stinking.
Later, when he asked, they told him Uncle had died. He thought they’d let him go then, but they didn’t. They kept looking all over him for sores, like the sores most of the people in the camp had.
Then one day there was a Moldy preaching in the camp. Preaching how it was near the end of the time for man. How it was time for man to depart, for he was only rotten flesh and decaying bone. How it was time to leave the universe clean for the next generation. How those who died now would rise again in the New Creation, clad in light, beautiful as the dawn.
Jorny knew then what had happened to Uncle Shales. He had shed his flesh so he could come back, dressed all in light, like an angel. Jorny cried, the first time he’d let himself cry out loud, right there in the dusty street of the camp, half-hidden behind one of the scruffy trees. He had waited until the Moldy was finished and had gone up to him and said who he was and that his uncle had died and he wanted to get out of the camp. The man had patted him on the shoulder and said he could get him out, that Jorny could become a Moldy right then, without even having a toothbrush. He got in a truck with the
