Against the Day (151 page)

“What
if it’s just the name of whoever sends these iron things down at those
Shanyagir folks?” Kit inquired, for whatever annoyance value there might be in
that.

“There
are no iron things, there are no iron things, that’s the point,” screamed
Lieutenant Prance. “These bloody shamans tell the people anything, no matter
how insane, and the people believe them, it’s like Americans, only different.”

   
“Think
this Magyakan is the one the Doosra was talking about?”

Prance
had no idea, and moreover, as he was quite happy to let Kit know, he didn’t
care.

   
“Strange
attitude for a divinity scholar to be taking, isn’t it?”

“Traverse, for God’s sake.” Prance
had been smoking all day and developed an impatient growl. “There is light, and
there is darkness.”

   
“Let
me guess. The Church of England is light, and everything else—”

“Not quite how it sorts out.
Differences among the world religions are in fact rather trivial when compared
to the common enemy, the ancient and abiding darkness which all hate, fear, and
struggle against without cease”— he made a broad gesture to indicate the
limitless taiga all around them— “Shamanism. There isn’t a primitive
people anywhere on Earth that can’t be found practicing some form of it. Every
state religion, including your own, considers it irrational and pernicious, and
has taken steps to eradicate it.”

“What? there’s no ‘state religion’ in
the U.S.A., pardner, we’ve got freedom of worship, it’s guaranteed in the
Constitution—keeps church and state separate, just so’s we don’t turn
into something like England and keep marching off into the brush with bagpipes
and Gatling guns, looking for more infidels to wipe out. Nothing personal o’
course.”

“The Cherokee,” replied Prance, “the
Apache, the massacre of the Sioux Ghost Dancers at Wounded Knee, every native
Red Indian you’ve found, you people have either tried to convert to
Christianity or you’ve simply killed.”

   
“That
was about land,” said Kit.

“I
suggest it was about the fear of medicine men and strange practices, dancing
and drugtaking, that allow humans to be in touch with the powerful gods hiding
in the landscape, with no need of any official church to mediate it for them.
The only drug you’ve ever been comfortable with is alcohol, so you went in and
poisoned the tribes with that. Your whole history in America has been one long
religious war, secret crusades, disguised under false names. You tried to
exterminate African shamanism by kidnapping half the continent into slavery,
giving them Christian names, and shoving your peculiar versions of the Bible
down their throats, and look what happened.”

   
“The
Civil War? That was economics. Politics.”

“That was the gods you tried to
destroy, waiting their hour, taking their revenge. You people really just
believe everything you’re taught, don’t you?”

“Guess I’ll have go to Cambridge and
get smart,” Kit not really taking offense. Possibilities for amusement being
limited out here in the taiga, why a man had to take what came along in the way
of recreational squabbling. “What got you into the divinity racket anyhow?”

“I
was a religious youth,” replied Dwight Prance. “It might easily have taken
other forms, choirsinging, sandalwearing, sermonizing on street corners, it
just happened to be the one choice certain to cancel itself out.”

   
“That’s
what you wanted?”

“It’s what happened. As I spent more
time studying religions, particularly Islam and Christianity, and began to
notice the many close connections to secular power, I grew more
. . .
hmm, contemptuous, you’d say, of the
whole enterprise.”

   
“Church
and state.”

Prance shrugged. “Quite natural to
find Cæsar setting up these cozy arrangements with God whenever possible, as
they’re both after the same thing, aren’t they.”

   
“And
you’ve gotten more interested—”

   
“In
the arrangements. Yes. Did you imagine I was praying every night?”

   
“Then
if you’re not out here soldiering for Christ—who for, exactly?”

“A
handful of men in Whitehall you’ve never heard of, whose faces no one recognizes.”

   
“And
the money’s good?”

Prance’s
laughter held little of the sacred, and seemed to go on for an unnaturally long
time. “You’d have to speak to them about that, I expect.”

From
time to time, Kit recalled the purity, the fierce, shining purity of Lake
Baikal, and how he had felt standing in the wind Hassan had disappeared into,
and wondered now how his certainty then had failed to keep him from falling now
into this bickering numbness of spirit. In view of what was nearly upon them,
however—as he would understand later—the shelter of the trivial
would prove a blessing and a step toward salvation.

heavenwide blast of light.

As of 7:17 a.m.
local time on 30 June 1908, Padzhitnoff had been working for nearly a year as a
contract employee of the Okhrana, receiving five hundred rubles a month, a sum
which hovered at the exorbitant end of spybudget outlays for those years.
Accordingly the great ship was riding a bit lower in the sky, its captain and
crew having put on collectively at least thirty extra poods, roughly half a
ton, and that didn’t include the weight of the masonry Padzhitnoff planned to
drop on designated targets, which it was necessary to bring along as ballast,
since most structures out here in Siberia seemed to be made of wood and brush,
a difficulty which, though challenging the
ekipazh
in a military way,
failed to contribute much to their spiritual ease until they first sighted
Irkutsk from the air and were amazed by the stately brickandmasonry homes of
the nouveau riche fur traders and gold magnates, crying
“
Právil’no!
”
and embracing. When extra lift was
needed, however, Russian design philosophy had ever been just to add on as much
buoyancy and engine power as you had to, and so as the
Bol’shaia Igra
evolved
through the years, weight control was never the serious engineering issue it
often proved to be in the aeronautics of other lands.

   
These
days there was little but nervousness among the cringers and climbers at all
levels of Razvedka. Since the naval defeat at Tsushima and the massive
demonstrations in the cities, the pogroms and terror and blood, the unthinkable
possibility had been dawning that God had abandoned Russia. What had been
certain and mandated by Heaven was now as loaded with

uncertainty as any peasant’s struggle
with the day, and all, regardless of wealth or position, must stumble blindly.

“
I am a warrior
, not a scientist,” protested Ofitser
Nauchny Gerasimoff. “You should be sending in professors.”

“That can wait,” Padzhitnoff said.
“Okhrana believe this Event could have been manmade, and they want to know
weapons implications.”

Gennady, the
umnik
of the
crew, gestured casually at the dead ranks of barkless virgin timber passing
below. “Manmade? This? God didn’t do this?”

“General Sukhomlinoff is more inclined
to suspect the Chinese, though he does not rule out the Germans.”

“He probably has another realestate
scheme in mind, seeing the land’s already been cleared free of charge.” Gennady
pretended to look down in amazement. “In fact, who’re all those people in
suits, riding on camels down there?
Zi!
wait! It’s realestate agents, out on caravan!”

“The General is eager to know how
this was done,” Padzhitnoff said. “He keeps saying, ‘Remember who invented
gunpowder.
’ ”

Pavel Sergeievitch, the intelligence
officer, gazed at the horizonless disaster. “No sign of fire there. No crater,
not even a shallow one. It wasn’t munitions—none we know of.”

   
“What
do the people who live down there say?”

   
“That
it was Agdy, their God of Thunder.”

   
“That’s
what they heard? thunder?”

“Soundpressure
of some kind
. . . .
Even so, it
appears the energy only moved laterally.”

“But
not quite radially,” Padzhitnoff said. “Helm, take us up three hundred meters.
I want all of you to see something curious.”

They
ascended into a sky from which color had drained absolutely, as if in the same
terrible moment that these millions of trunks had gone white, and, having
reached the desired altitude, still in the air, looking down like icons of
saints painted on the inside of a church dome.

   
“It
looks like a butterfly,” remarked Gerasimoff.

   
“An
angel,” said Pavel.

   
“It
is symmetrical, but not the ellipse of destruction one would expect.”

Padzhitnoff convened a meeting
of the officers, which, as it turned out, would not be
adjourned for weeks. They gathered in the wardroom and

worried together, in shifts. The crew
welcomed the slack and fell into a sort of holiday routine. Some played chess,
others drank. Everybody smoked, some failed to sleep. Those who did sleep
dreamed about playing chess and woke worrying about what kind of mental trouble
they might be in.

   
Meanwhile
the
zastolye
in the wardroom had grown philosophical.

“Were it not for the electromagnetic
readings, I should say it was a meteorite that exploded about five miles up.
But why should the area remain actively radiant like this?”

“Because what exploded was brought by
a conveyance, from somewhere else, out in Cosmic Exterior.”

“Because there is an important time
term hidden somewhere in the expression. With such an enormous discharge of
sound, light, and heat—why no crater?”

“If the object exploded too high
above the ground to do more than blow trees over—”

“—or the local distortion of
other variables was so intense that the crater somehow actually got displaced
along
the time axis.
”

   
“Perhaps
moved elsewhere in space as well.”

“
Khuy,
”
summarized
Bezumyoff, the knowitall or
vseznaîka
of the crew, “in that case we’re
fucked, aren’t we—there is now potentially a hole in the Earth no one can
see, waiting to materialize with no warning at all, in fact it may appear
at
any moment,
directly beneath St. Petersburg, for example—”

This
may just do the trick, thought Captain Padzhitnoff, the nervous collapse which
no feat of Japanese naval ordnance, no Russian winter, no mystical intrigue at
Tsarskoe Selo had been able to provoke, might only have been waiting for this
spectacle of a crew he believed he had come to understand attempting to deal
with the Event of 30 June. It had not escaped his notice that eyewitnesses
living below had unanimously reported stones falling from the sky, at least
suggesting the
Bol’shaia Igra
’s
own traditional specialty. The possibility had to be
entertained—had they fieldtested some new munitions device, for example,
over an “uninhabited” piece of Siberia, and had the result proven so terrible
that now they’d all developed a collective amnesia about it, perhaps as a way
of protecting their mental apparati?

“Believe
if you like in some extraterrestrial origin for this thing—but suppose
instead it were
extratemporal
—a four, perhaps fivedimensional
surface intersecting with ‘our’ continuum.”