The Heretic

“Your rifles saved the district. Maybe the Land itself,” said Abel. “You know that. There were over ten thousand of them, Golitsin. Ten thousand of them and five thousand of us.”

“Maybe not saved,” Golitsin replied. “Maybe evened the odds.”

“Tilted them in our favor,” Abel said. He stood. “All right, I should go. You won’t reconsider?”

A quick response this time. “No.”

“All right.”

Abel turned to leave.

“Good-bye, Dashian.”

“Yeah.”

“Coming to the burning?”

“I hadn’t planned on it.”

“Do, okay?”

Abel turned back. “You really want that?”

“Would make it better, knowing a friend was along.”

“Very funny,” Abel said. “But I’ll be there.”

“Okay,” said Golitsin. “Thank you.”

“Yeah.”

Abel walked toward the door. He knocked, but before it was opened by the exterior guards, he turned to have a last look at Golitsin. The priest was bent once again over the piano parts.

“It was a musical instrument,” Abel said. “It had strings. They were made of metal.”

Golitsin looked up in surprise and happiness. “Metal,” he said. “You knew all along! Metal.”

Then the door opened, and Abel left the priest to his contemplation.

2

Two days later, Abel got dressed in his room, in the house he still shared with his father these eleven years in Hestinga. He was up early, even earlier than Joab, for he had arrangements to make. As always each morning after dressing, he took the lock of his mother’s hair from its keeping place, wrapped in thin papyrus inside a small reed chest. He carefully unrolled the papyrus and gazed at the silken strands.

She was everything to me. She didn’t want to go away. It wasn’t her fault.

It was Zentrum’s fault.

He carefully returned the strands to the wardrobe drawer where he now kept them.

When he left the house the sun had not risen and the predawn brightness was just blowing to the east.

Did some planets spin in the opposite direction? Abel wondered. Are there places where the sun rises in the west and sets in the east?

Normally it is entire star systems that spin in the same direction due to the angular momentum of the rotation of the system itself, said Center. But sometimes planets within a solar system have their directional spin changed due to a cataclysmic event. In the original solar system from which humanity came, Venus is such an exception. And in the Duisberg system, this planet is itself an exception. This is a west-east oriented system. This anomaly, along with the three moons in eccentric orbits, suggests that this planet has been subject to enormous cataclysm in the past, and will likely experience another such event in the future.

The very rising of the sun tell us that Zentrum’s Stasis cannot last, Raj said. Humankind on this planet must be ready to escape or defend itself.

Abel exited through the door and quietly let down the rope latch so as not to disturb his father. The door could be opened from the outside. There were no elaborate rope and wood locks in Hestinga the way there were in Lindron.

He walked toward the military compound as the sun rose. He passed trees that he knew were both native and imported from off world in some distant past. Both seemed entirely part of the landscape now. There were the date palms and sycamores, pomegranates and flowering prickleweed. The air smelled fragrant and clean, not as humid and laden with scent as it would be later in the day. The dirt street was wide enough for two wagons and two dak teams to pass abreast, but no one was out quite yet, so instead of keeping to the side Abel walked directly down the middle of the street. A breeze whipped up dust around his sandaled feet. As usual, it was blowing out of the south, off an ocean he had never seen except in visions provided by the calculating machines he believed, had to believe or else he was insane, inhabited his mind and were at war with another broken calculating machine that sought to farm men like grain.

But today Zentrum was burning his heretic, just as he had foretold. And, maybe for the first time, Abel believed not merely in his mind, but in that place in his heart that had been holding out, that all of it was true. He wasn’t crazy. Wasn’t listening to nonsense made up as a child to shield himself from his mother being so suddenly yanked away from him. It wasn’t delusional. He had a task.

And, perhaps for the first time, he reflected that he was damned lucky. Most men were given no such calling, but had to stumble through the world trying to figure out what to do next. At least he would always know what he was supposed to do, if not precisely how.

When he was done making preparations at the garrison, the sun had fully risen and life had come to the streets of Hestinga. He walked toward the temple compound. The temple compound and the garrison had been built as anchors for the village, or perhaps the village had grown between them like two poles of a magnet. Center would know, but Abel had learned long ago that there were some questions he didn’t really want to get the answer to. Perhaps he could imagine his hometown forming both ways: as an orderly arrangement, on ground laid out with military precision and then sanctified by priests; and as a chaotic blooming of trading stalls and houses, growing more from a desire of the people who lived in the country and worked the Land to have something to do on Thursday afternoon after Law class than from any careful plan.

The gates of the temple compound were open today, and people had already arrived to get a good position from which to view the proceedings. Abel walked through and made his way past the armory to the main courtyard, surrounded by the Temple of Zentrum on the eastern side, and the temple offices to the west. The temple smith shop stood silent, dark, its fires banked. It seemed almost an edifice in shame.

Behind and to the north of the offices was the nishterlaub storehouse where the prisoner was being held. There was now a company of ten guards at the door-more to keep anything from happening to the prisoner before the appointed time than to keep the disgraced priest from escaping.

Abel was about to find his own place among the spectators, when a figure beckoned him from the entrance veranda of the temple offices. It was Prelate Zilkovsky, standing alone. Abel walked over to join him.

“Hello, Dashian,” said the prelate.

“Your Excellency,” answered Abel. “It’s early yet.”

“Yes,” said Zilkovsky. “I wanted to come and test myself.”

“Sir?”

“To see if I can bear it.” He nodded toward the great heaping bonfire built in the courtyard center, the huge post-perhaps the largest willow trunk Abel had ever seen-rising in its center. “They’ll chain him to the post. Has to be metal bindings. Rope would burn. He showed the underpriests how to forge them himself.”

Abel shook his head in wonder. “Golitsin is a funny man.”

“He was like a son to me,” said Zilkovsky. “He was out of the orphanage in Mims, where I was subaltern to old Chang. Just a servant, but he impressed me. So bright. I found him a place in the letters class, and he took to it, like I knew he would.”

“He told me had been an orphan.”

“I don’t know about that,” Zilkovsky said. “His parents are probably still running around somewhere if the ague or the carnadons haven’t gotten them. Most of those orphans were simply abandoned. Someone gave up on them.” Zilkovsky took the hem of his robe, touched an eye. “Now yet another parent is giving up on him.”

“So free him, Prelate,” Abel said. “You know he’s not a bad man.”