The Messiah Choice (1985) (30 page)

"The facial tattoos, I fear, are permanent. We can't figure out even now how they were done.

Those long rectangular stripes are actually set into the skin, for example, as if the face was actually molded around them. They're thick and solid, although pliant. They'd have to be removed surgically and the face would be a mess. The scars would never color, either. Still, it's a small price to pay if we can get her dressed and allow her some mobility."

"What about the language? Anything on that?" MacDon-ald wanted to know.

"Well, whatever hypnotic conditioning techniques they use, they're quite sophisticated and quite probably drug reinforced. All the information, all that she's ever been or known, is still there in her head, but it can't be fully accessed and the conditioning is so deep that she is convinced that nothing can be done about it. It's like the old voodoo thing in Haiti where someone makes a doll of you with some clippings of your hair and the like. Do what you will with the doll and nothing happens. But
show the victim
the doll and do something, and it happens to the victim. Pain, crippling, even death—because the victim knows and believes in the power. She believes. She had a religious, somewhat mystical outlook in her upbringing to begin with, I believe. Raised in a convent and all that. It'll be hell to shake her out of that belief. Best we leave it alone and let it come to the fore in social situations. Once she inadvertently reads a sign or understands a comment in English or French, such as a danger warning or somesuch, it'll all come back."

"Perhaps," Bishop Whiteley commented. "If, indeed, that's all it is. I feel very sorry for the poor child, though. Still, she's better off as she is and with us than with them, that's certain."

"So how has your God Squad been coming along?" Pip asked him. "Any results as yet?"

"Well, the plane with the latest information arrived this morning. Damned nuisance, having to do all this direct and without using long distance lines or direct computer terminals, but it's necessary. We don't wish to tip our hand."

Greg looked at him quizzically. "Just what
have
you been up to, Lord Bishop?"

"Pip calls them my God Squad. Actually, they're some very talented young people working on a continuing project for me at Oxford. Let us face it, my boy—if
they
have a computer, then
we
must have one, and one which can be cut off, in whole or part, from the international telenet. This project's been ongoing for years, and it's finally starting to pay off."

"Oh?" Greg was curious. This was, after all, the man Sir Robert was told was the greatest expert on cults and mysticism in the world. That was why, although Sir Robert had never lived to meet him, much less recruit him, he was now Queen's Bishop.

"In many ways, it's the counterpart to Sir Reginald's little project. Urn—do you know why I was made Bishop of Durham? And why I was so quickly and somewhat forcibly retired?"

"I admit I don't. I'm afraid the Anglican Church isn't my strong point."

"Indeed. I don't think it's mine any more, either. You see, lad, it's a state religion, so it must accommodate a tremendous range of religious views. The Durham seat has always gone to an academic, and most of the academics have been, shall we say, on the radical left of theology. Our brothers here, the Episcopals, are called radicals because they ordain women and in some cases even homosexuals of both sexes and because they go all out for radical causes, but they're mild compared to the old mother church. Not one of my three predecessors believed in the virgin birth or the divinity of Christ. My immediate predecessor, in fact, saw religion as an ethical guidance system and believed that whether or not God existed, He was irrelevant."

"Eminently sensible," remarked Lord Frawley.

The Bishop gave him a frown. "Pay no attention to him. He was Labour, of all things."

Greg decided to say nothing. His own political affiliation was with a party at least as leftist as British Labour.

"At any rate," continued the Bishop, "God may install vacuous clerics, but He keeps hold where it counts, with the parishioners. There was finally such a hue and cry and actual mass walkouts from services that the Archbishop finally decided to fill the next Durham bishopric with me.

Now, I'm the true radical in the Church. I believe in the holy Catholic-Church, in the virgin birth, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection and the existence of both heaven and hell. But, most importantly, I believe in the existence of evil and the reality of sin."

"In other words," Pip injected, "the Bishop isn't Tory, unless you count one who would be at home most in the court of Henry the Seventh a Tory."

"No, no, Henry the Eighth," Whitely retorted. "I picked the correct church. But, you see, they couldn't keep me shut up and on track any more than they could keep those social reformers'

mouths shut. I began to speak from the pulpit against the way many of the Church leadership had strayed, and had the temerity to suggest that anyone who professed not to accept the trinity and the resurrection should be excommunicated and told to join the Unitarians. I drew quite a following, and enormous pressure to resign. I did so, not because I was wrong to do it and say it, but because I couldn't get any of it through their thick skulls. They feared I was starting a revolt, a cult within the church, to gain personal power. Never once did they even consider my actual arguments! Their minds were so small and so limited that they simply couldn't believe that someone would act out of Christian faith and devotion; they could only interpret all my actions in the same way
they
thought—as petty power politics. I certainly knew how Henry and Martin Luther both felt in their day. One does not leave the church out of faith. One turns around one day and realizes that the church has left
him
."

"All this is well and good," Lord Frawley said sourly, "and I'm sure we will all buy and avidly read your autobiography, Alfred. But what is the point?" -

"The point, dear boy, is the whimsically named God Squad project at Oxford. There we have our own computer— not as good or as fancy as the one on Allenby, I daresay, but adequate—and some really bright young programmers who are also solid Christians. We've been pouring in, and classifying, and doing comparative analysis, on a tremendous mass of religious writings through the ages—and not just Christian, either. We ask questions, and if the question is valid and the information is sufficient and the program is good enough, we occasionally get an answer. Well, with the de-briefings and other information provided us, and what theology we can glean from what we've seen them about on Allenby, we have some answers, including a couple I suspected the moment I first saw that photograph of the Institute."

Both Greg and Pip were interested now. "Go on," MacDonald urged him.

"All right—let's go back to the beginning. Sir Reginald's brother is caught up in this Satanist thing and perhaps drags his younger brother into it. At any rate, Sir Reginald is left this huge library of cult, occult, and Satanist lore, and because he has this enormous project and this way to feed information in huge doses into a computer and store it in compressed form, he does so with the library. He can then sell the physical library at Sotheby, which he does, and distance himself from it while still having all of it."

"We already had that much," MacDonald told him.

"Well, yes. Now he plays around with it, doing the sort of correlating we're doing at Oxford, but he can only get so far until he's offered the job on the Magellan artificial intelligence project.

They build this ironically named SAINT on Allenby—I'm sure they must have worked to get that acronym—using the Japanese technology, and all goes swimmingly until Sir Reginald, on his own, dumps his huge file of occult material into the computer in his own private area. Now, I'm told this computer actually thinks—not in the way
we
do, but the end result is the same."

"That's correct," Lord Frawley told them. "That's exactly correct."

"But the thing's still a machine, and that's all it is. Garbage in is still garbage out, but it has no way of really telling what is and what is not. Now Sir Reginald uses as his hypothesis for his own program that all of the material he's put in it is actual, is real. The computer is told that it contains basic truths, things it is to assume as givens. Do you follow me so far?"

Frawley remained silent, deep in thought, but MacDonald nodded. "I think I see. It was told to believe it, so it did. So what? It's still only going to use it to solve Reggie's arcane little problems with the occult."

"I think it went further than that. Remember, there is one difference between this computer and the one Sir Reginald used originally to compile the information, the same difference that it has with
my
computer. Unlike those, it
thinks,
it
reasons.
But it's a box, an assemblage of silicon locked in a room." He reached over to one of the end tables and picked up a red-bound book, opened it, and paged through it to a page near the end.

"I thought about this almost immediately," he told them. "Now, listen. 'And I saw a beast rising out of the sea, with ten horns and seven heads, with ten diadems upon its horns and a blasphemous name upon its heads.' " He paused a moment. "Now let's skip down just a bit. 'Men worshipped the dragon, for he had given his authority to the beast, saying, 'Who is like the beast, and who can fight against it?' " He sighed, then went on.

" 'And the beast was given a mouth uttering haughty and blasphemous words, and it was allowed to exercise authority for forty-two months. . . . Also it was allowed to make war on the saints and to conquer them. And authority was given it over every tribe and people and tongue and nation, and all who dwell on earth will worship it, every one whose name has not been written before the foundation of the world in the book of life of the Lamb that was slain. If any one has an ear, let him hear: If any one is to be taken captive, to captivity he goes; if any one slays with the sword, with the sword must he be slain. Here is a call for the endurance and faith of the saints.' "

"Very instructive," Pip noted. "Now what's the point of all that mumbo-jumbo? What is that you're reading, anyway?"

"The Bible, old man. Revised Standard Version, which is not as melodious, but it's good enough.
The Revelation to John,
also known as the
Apocalypse.
The final authority even for any Judeo-Christian based occultist. Now consider what I've read. There are a million interpretations possible and ten million have already been made through the ages. Put it together with all that Satanist claptrap, sew it all up, assume it as real, and we have our SAINT looking at itself. I can tell you still don't see at all. Go get that photograph of the Institute."

Greg got up, went into the study, found it, and brought it back. It was an aerial photo used by the company in some publicity shots. It showed the buildings of the Institute surrounding the great antennas of the computer.

"Behold the seven heads of the Beast," the Bishop told them.

"Hmph!" Frawley snorted. "And where's the ten horns?"

"Inside the seven heads. All have single feeder horns for sending and receiving, except the ones on each end and the one in the center, which look slightly different and have two apiece. That's ten 'horns,' as I believe they're called sometimes. Now consider what they do. They listen to and talk to most of the world, including the Soviets whether you deny it or not. Our modern world today still has the bulk of its people in subsistence life living as their ancestors did, but even the most primitive of nations is dependent now on the computer and on telecommunications. All international banking, most military work, most diplomatic work, is done that way. News, television, radio, telephone and telegraph—it's all done by computers via satellite. All the nations of the Earth now bow down and worship their keyboards, their disk drives, their terminals and telecommunications programs. We're so dependent on them, and so completely obedient to them, that we follow them as if our very lives depended on it. Computers are taken as best testimony.

I'm
still
getting bills from Harrod's for stuff I never ordered and they
agree
I never ordered. But I shall still be hauled into court one of these days for not paying for it. As for the blasphemy, I can think of worse things, but the word SAINT written inside each one of the dishes is good enough I should think."

"What are you saying?" MacDonald asked, confused. "That SAINT is the devil incarnate or something?"

"No, I'm saying that it reached that conclusion on its own. What few criteria didn't fit it arranged to fit. It believes that it is the Beast of the Bible, the terrible dragon, the serpent of Eden incarnate. Now, tell me—this master telecommunications network, this worldwide super system.

How long has
it,
rather than SAINT, been active and operational?"

MacDonald thought a moment. "Well, SAINT's about five years old, but the master network was installed, oh, about three and a half years now."

"Not about. Exactly."

He strained to remember. "Um—operational date was, I think, three years ago last May. Maybe April."

"Could it have been April thirtieth?"

"Uh—yes, now that you mention it, I think it
was
the last day of April. Huh! Three years to the day before Sir Robert was murdered."

"Indeed. Walpurgis. The night of that date is particularly powerful in Satanist lore. And six months later, October 31, is All Hallow's Eve, another important Satanist date, although no more prime than others. Still, the last day of October of this year will mark the forty-second month that the telecommunications network has been in existence. So the Beast will have reigned, and set up, and caused its evil for forty-two months at that time. Then will be the beginning of the end of the world. Then it will delegate its powers, relinquish them to the one who will lead the world to Armageddon, the last war. That person will be the Antichrist."