last few grains of sand and grit from the Bare, making it entirely clear how this arid region came to be stripped not just of any ground cover but of any ground at all. They were travelling across the very bones of their vast world, tyl Loesp thought, the absolute base and fundament of all that gave them life.
When the wind eased a little and veered, he ordered his half-track command vehicle to stop and got down from it. The machine grumbled beside him, headlights picking out twin cones of creamy Bare ahead of it. All around, the army trundled past, engines blattering, unseen fumes rising into the inky dark. He took his glove off, knelt and pressed his open palm against the Bare, against the pure Prime of Sursamen’s being.
I touch the ancient past, he thought, and the future. Our descendants might build on this mighty, God- threatening scale, one day. If I cannot be there — and the aliens had the gift of eternal life, so he might be there if all went as he dared to hope — then my name shall.
Nearby in the loud darkness, a supply wagon’s tractor had broken down; a spare was being attached.
He put his glove back on and returned to the half-track.
“Frankly, sir, it’s a murder weapon,” Illis, the palace armourer, said. He was squat and sturdy. His hands were dark, ingrained.
Oramen turned the slim but allegedly powerful pistol over in his hand. He had fretted about Harne’s warning for some days before eventually deciding to dismiss it, but had then woken from a dream wherein he’d been trapped in a chair while faceless men shoved knives into his arms. He had been going to dismiss that too, but then came to the conclusion that something inside him was worried, and even if it was just to keep such nightmares at bay, carrying a weapon more powerful than just his usual long knife might be advisable.
The gun felt heavy. Its mechanism was worked by a strong spring so that it could be used single-handed and it contained ten one-piece shells, arranged in a sort of staggered vertical within the handle and propelled to the firing chamber by another spring, cocked by a lever that folded away after use.
The shells were cross-cut on their tips. “A man-stopper,” Illis said, then paused. “Actually, a hefter-stopper, to serve truth fair.” He smiled, which was a little disconcerting as he had very few teeth left. “Try to avoid accidents with it, sir,” he said reasonably, then insisted the prince practise using it in the long firing gallery attached to the armoury.
The gun certainly kicked like a hefter — and barked louder than one — Oramen thought, but it fired straight and true.
He found a place for its lightly oiled ynt-hide holster, concealed in a plumped-out part of his tunic at the back, and promised to keep its safety catch secured.
12. Cumuloform
It was some time before Ferbin would accept he was not dead. He drifted up towards some sort of awareness to find himself suspended in airy nothing beneath a vast glowing mass of frozen bubbles. Enormous gold-tinged clouds stretched in every direction, mostly up. Far below was a startlingly blue ocean, devoid of land. Unchanging, patterned with a ruffled weave of waves, it seemed, for all its oceanic blueness, somehow frozen.
Sometimes, as he drifted over this apparition, it did seem to change, and he thought he saw tiny flecks appear on its surface, but then the tiny flecks disappeared with the same microscopic slowness with which they had come into being, and all was as before; serene, calm, unchanging, heavenly…
He had the feeling he had recently been in the ocean, though it had been warm rather than cold and he had been able to breathe despite being submerged in it. It was as though death was somehow like being born, like being still in the womb.
And now he was here in this strange scape of infinite cloud and never-ending ocean with only the comforting presence of slowly passing Towers to reassure him he was in the appropriate afterlife. And even the Towers seemed too far apart.
He saw a face. It was a human face and he knew he ought to recognise it.
Then he was awake again and the face had gone. He suspected he had dreamed the face, and wondered about dreaming when you were patently dead. Then he seemed to fall asleep. In retrospect, that was surprising too.
He was awake, and there was a strange numbness about his back and right shoulder. He could feel no pain or discomfort, but it felt like there was a huge hole in him covering a quarter of his torso, something that he couldn’t reach or feel or do anything with. Filling his ears was a distant roaring noise like a waterfall heard at a distance.
He floated over the unimpeachably perfect blueness. A sunset came on slowly, burnishing the huge clouds with red, violet and mauve. He watched a Tower slide past, its sallow trunk disappearing into the deepening azure mass of the sea, edged with white where the surfaces met.
Then it was dark and only distant lightning lit the ocean and the towering clouds, ushering him back to sleep with silent bursts of faraway light.
This must, he thought, be heaven. Some sort of reward, anyway.
Ideas about what happened after you died varied even amongst the priestly caste. Primitives were able to have more straightforward religions because they didn’t know any better. Once you knew even a little of the reality of the situation in the outside universe, it all got a bit more complex: there were lots of aliens and they all had — or had once had — their own myths and religions. Some aliens were immortal; some had constructed their own fully functional afterlives, where the deceased — recorded, transcribed — ended up after death; some had made thinking machines that had their own sets of imponderable and semi-godlike powers; some just were gods, like the WorldGod, for example, and some had Sublimed, which itself was arguably a form of ascension to Godhead.
Ferbin’s father had had the same robustly pragmatic view of religion as he’d had of everything else. In his opinion, only the very poor and downtrodden really needed religion, to make their laborious lives more bearable. People craved self-importance; they longed to be told they mattered as individuals, not just as part of a mass of people or some historical process. They needed the reassurance that while their life might be hard, bitter and thankless, some reward would be theirs after death. Happily for the governing class, a well-formed faith also kept people from seeking their recompense in the here and now, through riot, insurrection or revolution.
A temple was worth a dozen barracks; a militia man carrying a gun could control a small unarmed crowd only for as long as he was present; however, a single priest could put a policeman inside the head of every one of their flock, for ever.
The more comfortably off, and those with real power, might choose to believe or not as their personal proclivities dictated, but their relatively easeful, pleasant lives were their own rewards, and for the highest in the land, posterity — a place in history itself — would be their prize after death.
Ferbin had never really bothered with thoughts of an afterlife. Where he was now did seem like heaven, or something like it, but he wasn’t sure. Part of him wished he’d paid more attention to the priests when they’d been trying to instruct him about this sort of thing, but then, given that he appeared to have achieved the afterlife
