“See, bounty from the waves, harvest from the rolling ocean, my people prepare to break their fast." The prophet swept one
fatwobbling arm
about to indicate the people tending the fires and cauldrons. The smell of rotting food filled the air.
“They eat what others leave, what others will not touch, because they want to be closer to the fabric of Fate. They eat the
bark from the trees
and the grass from the ground and the moss from the rocks; they eat the sand and the leaves and the roots
and the earth; they eat the shells
and the entrails of sea-animals and the carrion of the land and the ocean; they eat their
bodily products and share mine. I am the fount. I am the
well-spring, the taste on their tongues.
“You, bubble of froth on the ocean of life, are a sign. Crop of the ocean, you will come to see, before the time of your unmaking,
that you are
all you have eaten, and that food is merely undigested excrement. This I have seen; this you will see."
One of the attendant women came back from the sea with Fwi-Song’s freshly cleaned sets of teeth. He took them from her and
put them in
the rags somewhere behind him. “All shall fall but we, all go to their deaths, their unmakings. We alone will
be made in our unmaking, brought
into the glory of our ultimate consummation."
The prophet sat smiling at Horza, while around him—as the long afternoon’s shadows drew out across the sands—the emaciated,
ill-
looking people sat down to their foul meals. Horza watched them try to eat. Some did, encouraged by Mr. First, but most
could keep nothing
down. They gasped for breath and gulped at the liquids, but often as not they vomited up what they had
just forced down. Fwi-Song looked on
them sadly, shaking his head.
“You see, even my closest children are not ready yet. We must pray and entreat that they are ready when the time comes, as
it must, in a
few days’ time. We must hope that their bodies’ lack of grasp, of sympathy with all things, will not make them
despised in the eyes and mouth of
God."
You fat bastard. You’re within range, if you only knew. I could blind you from here; spit in your little eyes and maybe
…
But, Horza thought, maybe not. The giant’s eyes were set so deep within the flabby skin of his brows and cheeks that even
the venomous
spittle with which Horza could have hit the golden monster might not find its way to the membranes of the eye.
But it was all Horza could find to
give him solace in his situation. He could spit at the prophet, and that was it. Perhaps
there would come a point when it might make some
difference, but to do it now would be stupid. A blind, enraged Fwi-Song struck
Horza as something to try to avoid even more than a sighted,
tittering one.
Fwi-Song talked on to Horza, never questioning, never really stopping, repeating himself more and more often. He told him
about his
revelations and his past life; as a circus freak, then as a palace pet for some alien satrap on a Megaship, then
as a convert to a fashionable
religion on another Megaship, his revelation occurring there, when he persuaded a few converts
to join him on an island to await the End of All
Things. More followers had arrived when the Culture announced what the fate
of the Vavatch Orbital was going to be. Horza was only half
listening, his mind racing as he tried to think of a way out.
“… We await the end of all things, the last day. We prepare ourselves for our final consummation by mixing the fruits of earth
and sea and
death with our fragile bodies of flesh and blood and bone. You are our sign, our aperitif, our scent. You must
feel honored."
“Mighty Prophet," Horza said, swallowing hard and doing his best to keep his voice calm. Fwi-Song stopped talking, the eyes
narrowing still
further and a frown forming. Horza went on, “I am indeed your sign. I bring you myself; I am the follower…
the disciple numbered Last. I come to
rid you of the machine from the Vacuum." Horza looked over at the Culture shuttle, sitting
with its rear doors open at the far end of the beach. “I
know how to remove this source of temptation. Let me prove to you
my devotion by performing this small service for your great and majestic
self. Then you will know I am your last and most
faithful servant: the one numbered Last, the one come before the unmaking, to… to steel your
followers for the test to come
and remove the Anathematics’ temptation device. I have mixed with the stars and the air and ocean, and I bring
you this message,
this deliverance." Horza stopped there, his throat and lips dry, his eyes running as the highly spiced stench of the Eaters’
food drifted on a light breeze around him. Fwi-Song sat quite still on his litter, looking into Horza’s face with his slit-eyes
narrowed and his
bulbous brows creased.
“Mr. First!" Fwi-Song said, turning to where the pale-skinned man in the tunic was massaging one of the Eaters’ bellies while
the
unfortunate follower lay moaning on the ground. Mr. First rose and came over to the giant prophet, who nodded at Horza
and spoke in the
language the Changer couldn’t understand. Mr. First bowed slightly, then went behind Horza, taking something
from under his tunic as he went
out of the Changer’s field of view. Horza’s heart thudded. He looked desperately back at Fwi-Song.
What had the prophet said. What was Mr.
First going to do. Hands appeared over Horza’s head, gripping something. The Changer
closed his eyes.
A rag was tied tightly over his mouth. It smelled of the foul food. His head was forced back against the stake. Then Mr. First
went back to the
prone, groaning Eater. Horza stared at Fwi-Song, who said:
“There. Now, as I was saying…"
Horza didn’t listen. The fat prophet’s cruel faith was little different from a million others; only the degree of its barbarity
made it unusual in
these supposedly civilized times. Another side effect of the war, maybe; blame the Culture. Fwi-Song talked,
but there was no point in listening.
Horza recalled that the Culture’s attitude to somebody who believed in an omnipotent God was to pity them, and to take no
more notice of
the substance of their faith than one would take of the ramblings of somebody claiming to be Emperor of the
Universe. The nature of the belief
wasn’t totally irrelevant—along with the person’s background and upbringing, it might tell
you something about what had gone wrong with them
—but you didn’t take their views
seriously.
That was the way Horza felt about Fwi-Song. He had to treat him as the maniac he obviously was. The fact that his insanity
was dressed in
religious trappings meant nothing.
No doubt the Culture would disagree, claiming that there was ample common ground between insanity and religious belief, but
then what
else could you expect from the Culture. The Idirans knew better, and Horza, while not agreeing with everything the
Idirans stood for, respected
their beliefs. Their whole way of life, almost their every thought, was illuminated, guided and
governed by their single religion/philosophy: a
belief in order, place and a kind of holy rationality.
They believed in order because they had seen so much of its opposite, first in their own planetary background, taking part
in the
extraordinarilyfierce evolutionary contest on Idir, and then—when they finally entered into the society of their local
stellar cluster—around them,
between and among other species. They had suffered because of that lack of order; they had died
by the millions in stupid, greed-inspired
wars in which they became involved through no fault of their own. They had been
naïve and innocent, over-dependent on others thinking in the
same calm, rational way they always did.
They believed in the destiny of
place.
Certain individuals would always belong in certain places—the high ground, the fertile lands, the
temperate isles—whether
they had been born there or not; and the same applied to tribes, clans and races (and even to species; most of the
ancient
holy texts had proved sufficiently flexible and vague to cope with the discovery that the Idirans were not alone in the universe.
The texts
which had claimed otherwise were promptly ditched, and their authors were first ritually cursed and then thoroughly
forgotten). At its most
mundane, the belief could be expressed as the certainty that there was a place for everything, and
everything ought to be in its place. Once
everything was in its place, God would be happy with the universe, and eternal peace
and joy would replace the current chaos.
The Idirans saw themselves as agents in this great reordering. They were the chosen—at first allowed the peace to understand
what God
desired, and then goaded into action rather than contemplation by the very forces of disorder they gradually understood
they had to fight. God