Deus Irae (2 page)

“With the final composition; what you’ve done is excellent. The color thirty-five-millimeter slides we sent on—they were delighted, those who looked at them; you know, the Church Eltern.”

Reflecting, Tibor said, “Strange. You can still get color film and get it processed. But you can’t get a daily newspaper.”

“Well, there’s the six-o’clock news on the radio,” Father Handy pointed out. “From Salt Lake City.” He waited hopefully. There was no answer; the limbless man drank the coffee silently. “Do you know,” Father Handy said, “what the oldest word in the English language is?”

“No,” Tibor said.

“‘Might,’” Father Handy said. “In the sense of being mighty. It’s
Macht
in the German. But it goes further back than Teutonic; it goes all the way back to the Hittites.”

“Hmmm.”

“The Hittite word
mekkis
. ‘Power.’” Again he waited hopefully. “‘Did you not chatter? Is this not woman’s way?’” He was quoting from Mozart’s
Magic Flute
. “‘Man’s way,’” he finished, “‘is action.’”

Tibor said, “You’re the one who’s chattering.”

“But you,” Father Handy said, “must act. I had something to tell you.” He reflected. “Oh yes. The sheep.” He had, behind the church in a five-acre pasture, six ewes. “I got a ram late yesterday,” he said, “from Theodore Benton. On loan, for breeding. Benton dumped him off while I was gone. He’s an old ram; he has gray on his muzzle.”

“Hmmm.”

“A dog came and tried to run the flock, that red Irish-setter thing of the Yeats’. You know; it runs my ewes almost daily.”

Interested now, the limbless man turned his head. “Did the ram—”

“Five times the dog approached the flock. Five times, moving very slowly, the ram walked toward the dog, leaving the flock behind. The dog, of course, stopped and stood still when he saw the ram coming toward him, and so the ram halted and pretended; he cropped.” Father Handy smiled as he remembered. “How smart the old fellow was; I saw him crop, but he was watching the dog. The dog growled and barked, and the old fellow cropped on. And then again the dog moved in. But this time the dog ran, he bounded by the ram; he got between the ram and the flock.”

“And the flock bolted.”

“Yes. And the dog—you know how they do, learn to do—cut off one ewe, to run her down; they kill the ewe, then, or maim them, they get them from the belly.” He was silent. “And the ram. He was too old; he couldn’t run and catch up. He turned and watched.”

Both men were then, together, silent.

“Can they think?” Tibor said. “The ram, I mean.”

“I know,” Father Handy said, “what I thought. I went to get my gun. To kill the dog. I had to.”

“If it was me,” Tibor said, “if I was that ram, and I saw that, I saw the dog get by me and run the flock and all I could do was watch—” He hesitated.

“You would wish,” Father Handy said, “that you had already died.”

“Yes.”

“So death, as we teach the Servants of Wrath—we teach that it is a solution. Not an adversary, as the Christians taught, as Paul said. You remember their text. ‘Death, where is thy sting? Grave, where is thy victory?’ You see my point.”

Tibor said slowly, “If you can’t do your job, better to be dead. What is the job I have to do?”

In your mural, Father Handy thought, you must create His face.

“Him,” he said. “And as He actually is.”

After a puzzled pause Tibor said, “You mean His exact physical appearance?”

“Not,” Father Handy said, “a subjective interpretation.”

“You have photos? Vid data?”

“They’ve released a few to me. To be shown to you.”

Staring at him, Tibor said, “You mean you have a
photo
of the Deus Irae?”

“I have a color photo in depth, what before the war they called 3-D. No animated pics, but this will be enough. I think.”

“Let’s see it.” Tibor’s tone was mixed, a compound of amazement and fear and the hostility of an artist hampered, impeded.

Passing into his inner office, Father Handy got the manila folder, came back with it, opened it, brought out the color 3-D photo of the God of Wrath, and held it forth. Tibor’s right manual extensor seized it.

“That’s the God,” Father Handy said presently.

“Yes, you can see.” Tibor nodded. “Those black eyebrows. That interwoven black hair; the eyes … I see pain, but he’s smiling.” His extensor abruptly returned the photo. “I can’t paint him from that.”

“Why not?” But Father Handy knew why not. The photo did not really catch the god-quality; it was the photo of a
man
. The god-quality; it could not be recorded by celluloid coated with a silver nitrate. “He was,” he said, “at the time this photo was taken, having a luau in Hawaii. Eating young taro leaves with chicken and octopus. Enjoying himself. See the greed for the food, the lust creating an unnatural expression? He was relaxing on a Sunday afternoon before a speech before the faculty of some university; I forget which. Those happy days in the sixties.”

“If I can’t do my job,” Tibor said, “its your fault.”

“‘A poor workman always blames–’”

“You’re not a box of tools.” Both manual extensors slapped at the cart. “My tools are here. I don’t blame; I use them. But you— you’re my employer; you’re telling me
what
to do, but how can I, from that one color shot? Tell me—”

“A Pilg. The Eltern of the Church say that if the photograph is inadequate—and it is, and we know it, all of us—then you must go on a Pilg until you find the Deus Irae, and they’ve sent documents pertaining to that.”

Blinking in surprise, Tibor gaped, then protested, “But my metabattery! Suppose it gives out!”

Father Handy said, “So you do blame your tools.” His voice was carefully controlled, quietly resounding.

At the stove, Ely said, “Fire him.”

To her, Father Handy said, “I fire no one. A pun. Fire: their hell, the Christians. We don’t have that,” he reminded her. And then to Tibor he said the Great Verse of all the worlds, that which both men understood and yet did not grasp, could not, like Papagano with his net, entangle. He spoke it aloud as a bond holding them together in what
they
, the Christians, called
agape
, love. But this was higher than that; this was love and man and beautifulness, the three: a new trinity.

After he said that, Tibor nodded, picked up his coffee cup once more, that difficult, elaborate motion and problem; sipped. The room became still and even Ely, the woman, did not chatter.

Outdoors, the cow which pulled Tibor’s cart groaned huskily, shifted; perhaps, Father Handy thought, it is looking for, hoping for, food. It needs food for the body, we for our mind. Or everyone dies. We must have the mural; he must travel over a thousand miles, and if his cow dies or his battery gives out, then we expire with him;
he is not alone in this death
.

He wondered if Tibor knew that. If it would help to know. Probably not. So he did not say it; in this world nothing helped.

Neither man knew who had written the old poem, the medieval German words which could not be found in their Cassell’s dictionary; they together, the two of them, had imagined out, summoned, found, the meaning of the words; they were certain they were right and understood. But not exactly. And Ely sneered.

But it was, I see the light-stricken thicket. In green—and then they did not quite know. It somehow stood in greenness. And we will all go there … was it
soon
? The summertime to—but to what? To reach? To find? Or was it—the summertime to leave?

They
felt
it, he and Tibor; a final truth, and yet it was, for them in their ignorance, without reference sources, both leaving and finding the summertime, the sun-struck woodland; it was life and the leaving of life fused, since they did not quite make it out rationally, and it frightened them, and yet they turned and returned to it, because—and perhaps exactly because they could not understand—it was a balm; it salved them.

Now, Father Handy and Tibor needed a power—mekkis, Father Handy thought to himself—to come from Above and aid them … on this, the Servants of Wrath agreed with the Christians: the good power lay Above,
Ubrem Sternenzelt
, as Schiller had once said: above the band of stars. Yes,
beyond
the stars; this they were clear on; this was modern German.

But it was strange, depending on a poem whose meaning one did not actually grasp; he wondered, as he unfolded and searched through the old stained gas-station maps once given out free in prewar days, if this was not a stigma of degeneracy. An omen of badness … not just that the times were bad but that they themselves had become bad; the quality was lodged within them.

His conference now was with the Dominus McComas, his superior in the hierarchy of the Servants of Wrath; the Dominus sat, large and tepid, with strangely cruel teeth, as if he tore things, not necessarily living, in fact much harder—as if he did a job, a profession, teethwise.

“Carl Lufteufel,” the Dominus McComas said, “was a son of a bitch. As a man.” He added that because of course one did not speak of the god part of the god-man, the Deus Irae, like that. “And,” he said, “I’ll give you ten to five that he made martinis with
sweet
vermouth.”

“Did you ever drink sweet vermouth straight or with ice?” Father Handy asked.

“It’s sweet piss,” McComas grated in his horrid, low voice, and, as he spoke, cut into his spongy gum with the tail of a wooden match. “I am not kidding; it’s nothing but horse piss they’ve bought.”

“Diabetic horses,” Father Handy said.

“Yeah, passing sugar.” McComas grunted a ha-ha; his round, red—red as if they had short-circuited and the metal in them had heated up, dangerous and improper—eyes sparked; but this was normal, as was his half-zipped fly. “So your inc,” McComas grated, “is going to roll all the way to Los Angeles. Is it downhill?” And this time he laughed so that he spat onto the table. Ely, seated off in a corner, knitting, stared at him with such flat hate that Father Handy felt uncomfortable and turned his attention to the creased gas-station maps.

“Carleton Lufteufel,” Father Handy said, “was Chairman of the Energy Research and Development Administration from 1982 to the beginning of the war.” He spoke half to himself. “To the use of the gob.” The great objectless bomb, a bomb which detonated not at one particular spot on the Earth’s surface but which acted so as to contaminate a layer of the atmosphere itself. It therefore (and this was the sort of weapons-theorizing that had gone on prior to World War Three) could not be headed off, as a missile could be by an antimissile, or a manned bomber, no matter how fast—and they had gone quite fast, by 1982—by, incredibly, a biplane. A slow biplane.

In 1978 the biplane had reappeared in the D-III. Defensive III, a flap-flap man-made pelican which held within it a limitless
fuel supply; it could circle, at low altitude, for months, while, within, the pilot lived off his suit as Our Grandparents had lived off trees and shrubs. The D-III biplane had a tropic device which directed its efforts when a manned bomber, even at fantastic altitude, came; the D-III began to ascend when the bomber was still a thousand miles away, releasing from between its wings a sinkerlike weight of vast density which pulled the plane to the proper altitude; the D-III and its pilot were actually jerked high, where no atmosphere to speak of existed. And the sinker—it had actually been called that, even though it did just the opposite; it in fact lifted—carried the biplane and the man within toward the manned bomber, and all at once the two objects met. And everyone died. But “everyone” was only three men in all: two in the bomber, one in the D-III. And, below, a city lived on, lit up, composedly functioning.

While other D-IIIs circled, circled, month after month; like certain raptors, they hovered for a seeming eternity.

However, it was not truly eternity. The antimissiles and the D-IIIs had kept off the fatal wasps for a finite time, and then at last the Dies Irae had come—for everyone, because of the gob, the great objectless device which Carleton Lufteufel had detonated from a satellite at an apogee of five thousand miles. It had been imagined that the U.S. would in some mysterious fashion survive and prosper, perhaps because of a New Year’s Eve funny-hat artifact distributed to the multimillions of patriotic USers; it connected to cephalic veins and gave restitution to a bloodstream rapidly losing red corpuscles. The vacuum-cleaner salesmen’s convention-style headgear, however, had been finite, too; it had failed for many people long before the Krankheit—the sickness—had faded. The great, grand corporation which had sold the Pentagon and the White House on the funny hats—it too had disappeared, gotten not by bone-marrow-destroying fallout but by direct hits from missiles which ducked and wove faster than the anti-ms twisted and darted. Don’t look back, Satchel Paige had once said; something may be gaining on you. The missiles from People’s China had not looked back and the things gaining on them had not reached them in time; China could die with the happy knowledge that out of their miserable underground “backyard” factories they had developed a weapon
which even Dr. Porsche, had he still been alive, would have shaken his head at—nodded at with admiration.

But what, Doctor, Father Handy thought to himself as he shuffled and unfolded the ancient gas-station maps, had been the authentic really dirty weapon of the war? The gob of the Deus Irae had killed the most people … probably about a billion. No, the gob of Carleton Lufteufel, now worshiped as the God of Wrath—that had not been it, unless one went by mere numbers.

No; he had his own favorite, and, although it had killed only a relatively few million people, it impressed him: its evil was so blatant; it glowed and stank, as a U.S. Congressman had once said, like a dead mackerel in the night’s dark. And it, like the gob, was a U.S. weapon.

It was a nerve gas.

It caused the organs of the body to eat one another.

“Well,” the Dominus McComas growled, picking at his hardy teeth, “if the inc can do it, fine. If I was an Elter I wouldn’t give a damn if it looked like Lufteufel or not; I’d just get a good fat wicked bloated pig-face up there; you know, a swilling face.” And his own swilling face beamed, and how strange it was, Father Handy thought, because McComas looked like one would
imagine
the Deus Irae to look … and yet, the color photo had shown a man with pain-smeared eyes, a man who seemed ill in a deep and dreadful way even as he gorged on roast chicken with a lei around his neck and a girl—not pretty—to his right … a man with shiny, heavy, tumbled black hair and too much stubble, even though no doubt he carefully shaved; it was subdermal, showing through: not his fault, and yet it was
the mark
. But of what? Blackness was not evil; blackness was what Martin Luther in his translation of Genesis had meant when he said,
“Und die Erde war ohne Form und leer.” Leer;
that was it. That was what blackness was; when spoken it sounded like “layer” … a film negative, which, having been exposed to unshielded light, had, due to chemical action, turned to absolute opaqueness, to this quality of
leer
ness, this layer of glaucomalike blindness. It was like Oedipus wandering; what he saw, or rather what he failed to see. His eyes were not destroyed; they were really covered: it was a membrane. And so he, Father Handy, did
not hate Carleton Lufteufel, because that billion who had died had not gone like those who had been gassed by the U.S. nerve gas; its death had not been monstrous.