The Race for God (4 page)

He should go before the public now and make them take him seriously. It had to be that way, almost by definition, for he was carrying a momentous holy message.

He had asked God about that, if religion was supposed to be serious, and the response hadn’t really answered the question. God asked if religion was really the way to reach Him, and He phrased it rhetorically, as if it wasn’t the way.

God had chosen
him,
dammit! People wouldn’t dare laugh at him, not with the evidence of God’s power all around, not with the auras, even if only McMurtrey could see them. These were good people, and . . . but some carried weapons.

It was another problem of definition. Religious people had auras, or at least it was said the holiest did, the saints and prophets. The aura concept seemed almost hackneyed to McMurtrey, too pat, and this was troublesome. Didn’t people only see auras in imagination, in strange visions?

With so many theological representatives appearing at his doorstep, McMurtrey feared some were there to show him up, to prove him an infamous fraud. He might go out and bluff his way through for a while, taking full credit for the fleet and asserting that this miracle was an affirmation of the Interplanetary Church of Cosmic Chickenhood. But this facade wouldn’t last long if God intervened.

On the other hand, maybe God would want him to have fun with it for a while. What was the Leader of the Universe really like?

McMurtrey agonized over this for a long time, focusing his energies inwardly so intensely that his vision fogged over. Presently he shook his head, and again gazed upon the town.

Best to be humble, he decided. I’ll go out with No Name and admit everything.

The man slipped into the seclusion of a thick oak grove, and upon the ground he placed a sheet of white plazymer, which he stepped upon. With two fingers he rubbed the back of one hand until it was hot and a blister formed there.

From the forefinger of the other hand, a slender blade of blue bone pierced the fingertip bloodlessly, forming a cutting tool. With that blade he sliced around the sides of the blister, releasing an ooze of water and leaving it attached to the back of his hand with only a flap of epidermis. The blue bone blade receded into the fingertip, disappeared from view.

He lifted the flap of skin, and at a thought-impulse, a lance of red light emerged from one eye, passing through the epidermal flap and touching one of his black leather shoes. The shoe shriveled into a tiny dark flake which dropped on the plazymer. Then the thin white sock on that foot shriveled and fell as a white flake. This exposed the bare skin of the foot, and the skin was not affected by the light.

Quickly he repeated this procedure with the other shoe and sock, resulting in four flakes on the plazymer sheet. His coat, shirt, trousers and underclothes followed in like manner, and in short order he stood entirely in the buff, with a number of tiny flakes beneath him on the plazymer.

Then he remembered his cap, removed it and reduced it, relegating it to the micro-collection.

From his other eye a lance of violet light emerged, melding with the red light as both passed through the epidermal flap. They formed a spectrum of color on the other side of the flap, and a spectral light-bath covered the plazymer and the tiny flakes upon it

He stepped from the plazymer onto moist soil, and as he did so the edges of the plazymer shrank and wrapped around the flakes, enclosing them in a neat little white packet.

The packet, no more than a quarter the width of his smallest fingernail and only a little bit thicker, rose on the spectral beam. He focused the beam on his now-exposed bellybutton at the center of a round and protruding belly, and the packet tucked itself neatly into the orifice, disappearing from view.

Loyalty to the Bureau,
he thought.
The Bureau of Loyalty.

With the fingers of one hand, he smoothed the epidermal flap back onto the back of the other hand and sealed the bloodless wound, leaving no visible evidence of incision.

Cool, smooth currents of electricity traversed the superconductors of his artificial brain. He was pleased with this assignment, for he had been programmed to feel this way.

The happiest government employees were not human.

Jin understood full well that he wasn’t human, but felt no remorse at this. His cyberoo parts didn’t wear out easily, and theoretically he could go on forever with only minimal self-maintenance. He had been programmed to troubleshoot his own parts, a nearly failsafe method that encompassed backups on top of backups. Every part in his body and every power system had twelvefold redundancy.

This C-Unit 7891 was nearly invincible. Anyone attempting to destroy it would have to accomplish annihilation in one quick, efficient act. Short of that, one of the biogenerating redundancies would remain functional, from which Jin could reconstruct himself in a matter of seconds, using the raw material of his body and nearby materials of virtually any kind.

His last backup system represented self-preservation, a priority in this series exceeded only by Jin’s obligations to the Bureau.

Anyone attempting to destroy Jin had another obstacle to overcome, which Jin displayed now as part of his testing procedure. He touched his nose, and in a nanosecond little gunports opened around his body, revealing a panoply of mini-cannons. Some were on his face, with one on each cheek, one on his forehead and one in the center of his chin. Even his sexual organ had been converted to a baby howitzer.

He tested his guns, using silencers and blank cartridges. None misfired.

Now where did I put that damned broom?
he thought.

His eyes continued to project beams of red and violet, but in parallel.

With an unadulterated fingernail, he dug into his bellybutton, pulling out the white packet and dozens of others, in varying colors. He settled on a brown one, replaced the other packets. The beams of eye-light remerged, and he narrowed the spectral force, passing the tip of it over the packet. The packet unfolded in his hands, revealing a pile of light and dark flakes.

He heard and then felt a slight wind, sheltered the flakes to prevent scattering.

He nudged them around with a forefinger, found the one he wanted, which was distinguishable to his field of vision by its shape and hue.

The red light receded into one eye, leaving only violet, which touched only the selected flake. On the end of the light beam, he lifted the flake and watched it enlarge, into a rough straw broom on a long bamboo handle.

Momentarily he held the broom in midair on the beam, then let the broom thump to the ground.

Presently the brown packet had been replaced in his body cavity, and he was ready for the assignment. Now he was Jin the Plarnjarn, a holy man of uncommon excellence.

Stark naked and brushing the ground before each step, Jin emerged from the oak grove and merged slowly with the crowd approaching St. Charles Beach.

Don’t step on the tiniest insect,
he thought.
Not while anyone’s looking.

The forty-foot van trailer behind the truck was a fully contained execution and cryogenic body-freezing facility-—automated, but not to the extent it might have been. Gutan had no say in how it was set up, but nevertheless it seemed just right to him. He savored personal involvement, enjoyed hitting toggles, pushing buttons, sliding electronic switches.

It was mid-afternoon, and he’d labored nonstop since arriving early that morning. Only one more inmate to go, a woman whose corpse he had been looking forward to. He felt little fatigue, despite having traveled straight through from Oenix, where he had dispatched eighty-seven in two days.

Holding a lit opium pipe, he stood by the pentahedral-shaped mnemonic memory machine, watching while a robotic helper removed the last Death Row inmate from the onboard holding cell.

The pipe, which held black chunks of opium in an oval bowl, had a built-in rechargeable electric coil inside double walls of the bowl. This heated the opium and made it smokable. The smoke was black and acrid.

Mnemo was on, glowing yellow in neutral mode, and it emitted a faint, characteristic whine. The sound, unlike any Gutan had ever heard elsewhere, always brought to mind images of spinning orange and lilac Mobius strips. Today as always they were strips of every conceivable Mobius shape, from those approaching standard geometrical configurations to others that Gutan couldn’t categorize. Simultaneously they all stretched into perfectly round cylinders, and then spun away into a white void. They were seen to him internally with the sound of the machine, and he saw them whether his eyes were closed or open, through a separate viewing channel. Nothing in Gutan’s training instructed him about this sensory phenomenon, but from his understanding of the machine he assumed that the whirl into whiteness carried the memory of anyone inside the machine to incredible reaches of the past. Mnemo had a screen that projected the mental images of subjects, but Gutan had never seen the spinning Mobius colors on that screen.

With the sound off, he couldn’t bring even the simplest shapes forth in memory, though he had vague images of fields of shapes, and though he made the attempt innumerable times. This frightened him, for he had been taught that Mnemo carried its subject back through alternate paths of memory, and always they died in the machine. It seemed to him that his own alternate memory paths were being touched by the sound and perhaps by more, essentially priming him without carrying him back.

He was afraid to ask about this, for someone might think him particularly susceptible and decide that he would be a good subject for experimentation. This wasn’t simply a killing machine after all; it hadn’t been designed for that. And there were intriguing clues Gutan had seen, suggesting that he and the machine were engaged in a clandestine scientific experiment.

Curiously he had developed a longing to travel those mysterious paths, to enter the machine himself and EXPERIENCE. It was perhaps a death wish or entropy, or alternately a longing for another plane of existence where he might live in a different, unfamiliar form. Gutan didn’t fear death, but he didn’t want to lose the perks of his life: opium and fresh cadavers.

Things could be done with fresh cadavers.

Sometimes he estimated survival odds. Every person known to have entered the machine had died within it. But Gutan’s chance, it seemed to him, lay in the stories concerning Professor Pelter, that the professor didn’t have killing in mind when he designed the thing. Purportedly it was for a different, more important purpose, and the promise of discovering that purpose sometimes bolstered Gutan’s courage. Maybe with just the right settings . . .

The thought of a more important purpose amused Gutan. How deliciously ironic it would be if he of all people discovered something significant, something
really
significant.

The robotic helper was a PYA1200, with exponential strength. It could lift a medium-sized building if called upon to do so, and had the added feature of storage compactability. Now through black wisps of opium smoke Gutan saw it as a rolling Erector-set-man more than two meters high, that in an instant, at an operator’s command, could compress itself into a neat little box no larger than a toaster oven. Gutan called it “Fork” because of the stiff-armed forkliftlike manner in which it loaded and unloaded dispatchees from Mnemo.

Fork had pincers on the ends of his arms, which he was using to hold a huge naked woman. The van floor flexed as Fork rolled toward Gutan, passing the cryogenic bodychambers that were on one side.

The robot was like a good hunting dog with a prize for its master, but before the kill. The designers of Fork hadn’t bothered with much of a face—just a few rivets where features belonged, on a paper-thin alloy surface. Most modern robots had faces, apparently by popular demand, and even this unit had one, despite the premium of utility and compactness. Fork’s tightly riveted expression was entirely neutral—two parallel straight lines for the mouth, two rectangles for eyes, a circle for the nose. But now, in a drug-induced hallucination, Gutan thought he detected the glimmerings of a smile around the edges of the rivets comprising the mouth.

The woman in Fork’s grasp rivaled small planet mass, and in her naked, prone position her great pendulous breasts hung halfway to the floor. She didn’t struggle, although five of the twenty-eight already dispatched this day had struggled ferociously and paid for it. Fork wasn’t programmed to show patience or compassion, so he gave them pincer shots to the kidneys.

According to the death docket on the electronic clip pad, this woman was a “war criminal,” which probably meant she was a dissident involved in the peace movement, sentenced to death by the Bureau of Loyalty. A keloid scar spanned her face, and by her calm expression Gutan guessed she was either playing possum or in acceptance of her fate.

Gutan wished he were on commission, or better yet that he owned all this equipment. Just think what he could earn with a cushy government dispatch contract!

He tugged at the pipe, felt soothing smoke permeate his body.

In the reflection of a mirrored partition to his left he saw himself. A short man nearing sixty, he had curly black hair, black eyes and a close-cropped beard flecked with gray. He had a rather simian appearance, with a protruding forehead and high cheekbones. His head had a forward thrust to it, and as he stood by the memory machine he leaned forward involuntarily, his posture having long before been sacrificed through inattention. The stoop made him appear shorter than he actually was, but none of the cadavers he made love to ever complained. His arms and hands were long and apelike, with slender graceful fingers that dangled below his knees. His mother used to say he might have been a pianist with those fingers, if he hadn’t lost one in the tricycling accident.

Mnemo was regularly moved between truck-trailer rigs, and the rigs needed maintenance—so someone undoubtedly had a ripe government contract there for the picking. At appointed stops, workers in lime-green rubber coveralls moved Mnemo between truck transporters with strange looking extruders. At these stops, Dispatchers and rigs changed.