A black-and-white tabby cat came into the room with a live ferf in her jaws. She jumped onto the plinth and laid the animal against the base of the mass, then jumped down and left the room, purring loudly. Two other cats came in with similar burdens.
“That was Gotoit’s cat,” Jep remarked after a time. “That stripey one. She calls it Lucky.”
Saturday nodded and brushed the surface of the plinth with her bare palm, cleaning away the few scraps of scruffy ferf hair that remained on the stone. The bodies of the ferfs had disappeared silently into the mass before them.
“The God was hungry,” said Jep. “We’re the Ones Who have to take care of that.”
“I think the cats will take care of that,” returned Saturday.
“How come the cats didn’t take care of it before? With Bondru Dharm?”
“Bondru Dharm didn’t know about cats,” Saturday answered. “There weren’t any cats here when Bondru Dharm was raised. But we know about cats, and Birribat was one of us, so the cats will take care of that. We’re the Ones Who have to take care of all the rest of it.”
FIVE
• Scattered among the relentlessly cheerful and dedicated hosts of the High Baidee, who were so conscientious and hard-working they had little time to be introspective about their religion, there were a few whose natures demanded that they do more for the faith than merely dress and eat correctly, keep the four hundred positive ordinances, and engage in the conventional daily recitations of the words of the prophetess. They were the enthusiasts, the sectarian devotees, zealots of the Overmind, whose heads, unfooled-with by any outside force, urged them to stricter vigilance and more extreme effort.
One such fanatic, though his family and friends did not know it, was Shan Damzel. Another such was his friend and mentor, Howdabeen Churry. Though there was almost no difference in their ages, Shan considered himself Churry’s disciple. He went so far as to call Churry teacher, though only when they were alone. He did it to be daring, to share a secret between them, like a small boy sharing a newly learned dirty word. The word teacher was, like the words evangelist, missionary, apologist, or advocate, a word to which implications of head-fooling stuck like glue. High Baidee preferred words like lecturer, expositor, or commentator, words without any imputation of coercion. When one said teacher, the hearer might infer that someone was being taught, a thing no right-minded Baidee would consent to. Explaining something was all right. Teaching it was not. With the exception of religious matters, of course. Or military ones.
Howdabeen always demurred when Shan said teacher. “Perhaps I may clarify your own thoughts,” he was apt to say. “Perhaps my ideation throws your own conceptions into brighter light, but I make no effort to convince you of the correctness of my own mental processes or the position I take because of them.” Indeed, he had no reason to do so. Though Howdabeen was very young, only in his early twenties, he had enormous charisma. This attribute alone made him believable in the way that actors and demagogues are believable: he was so overwhelmingly convincing he was never required to demonstrate relevance. Though he was not particularly handsome, Howdabeen Churry was unsullied. He had that clarity of eye and clean sweetness of skin which spoke of a calm conscience housed in an uncorrupted body. Others might chant, “Stuff happens, not guilty,” responsively in the temple. Howdabeen intoned it, believing it utterly. He could not be guilty because his heart was pure. He was as assured of his purity as he was of his correctness, and he maintained his correctness by constant attention to himself and what he was doing and what he thought about things.
He carried this tendency toward self-autopsy into his professional life. When young Baidee joined Churry’s brigade, even those with appropriate backgrounds and acceptable habits were examined microscopically, as Churry, so he said, would have wished to be examined himself. Churry wanted no mere time-servers. He believed that danger had come and would come, that the Overmind intended recurrent tests of the readiness and dedication of its parts. Churry was convinced of it. His own senses, of which the Overmind obviously approved, confirmed it. Danger lurked. It was out there, somewhere, getting ready.
Thus, when Shan Damzel showed up in some excitement, announcing that he had been picked as part of a family team to go to Hobbs Land, ostensibly to do a survey, but really because of some unspecified danger that a probably paranoid woman had almost certainly invented, Churry eliminated all the qualifiers as he heard them and rubbed his mental hands together over the opportunity that remained. Of all the words Shan Damzel uttered, Howdabeen Churry heard fully only Hobbs Land and danger as the operative syllables.
Churry had a personal interest in possible dangers. Over the past two years he had been organizing a secret strike force, an association of several hundred like-minded Baidee brigadeers too young for the regular army and too zealous to sit on their hands. Older, perhaps wiser Baidee, if they had known of this covert corps, might have called it a punch of foolhardy young hotheads. Churry called it The Arm of the Prophetess. The Arm had been formed to protect everything the Baidee stood for. It was designed to move so swiftly that it would have struck and withdrawn before anyone knew it was there.
“Be careful,” said Churry to Shan in the voice of one devoted, though superior, friend to another. “When you get there, be exceptionally careful. Don’t take anything on faith. Don’t accept anyone’s word for anything.”
“Actually, we’re only supposed to keep our eyes open while we’re doing an Ancient Monuments Survey,” Shan demurred, a bit taken aback at Churry’s unqualified enthusiasm. “There won’t even be people where we’ll spend most of our time.”
“When there are people, note exactly what they say and what they do, Shan. Look for
