When True Night Falls (15 page)

“Could I ask you a question?” she asked him. Hesitantly, as though the request might offend him.

“Of course.” He turned to face her, leaning one arm against the railing. Surprised, but not displeased by her query. It was rare she talked to the humans at all, and rarer still that she turned to one of them for help of any kind; species hostility still ran hot in her blood. “Anything, Hesseth. What is it?”

“I was wondering....” Again a hint of hesitation, as if she didn’t know the proper way to express herself. “This is hard to put into words.”

“The simplest way is often the best.”

She considered it. And nodded, slowly. “All right, then. Explain it to me. Your Church. Your faith. You talk about it like a religion, but it isn’t just that, is it? I’ve seen human religions—I thought I understood them—but yours is different. When you and Tarrant get together ... it sounds more like a campaign than a faith, sometimes. Not like I’ve seen in the others. Why?”

“Tell me first what you see in others, and I’ll try to answer you.”

Her eyes, jet black in the darkness, narrowed as she considered. “Your kind has a need to believe that its species is the center of the universe. Some religions address that. You have a need to control your fate; some address that, at least in theory. You want certain things from the world, and so you create gods who’ll deliver them. You fear death, and so there are gods to administrate your afterlives. Etcetera. Etcetera.”

“And the rakh have no such needs?”

“The rakh are the rakh,” she said smoothly. “Very different. Assst, how can I explain it to you? Our species is one small part of a very complex world, and we sense—and accept—our natural place in it. We see this planet as a living, breathing thing and we know ourselves an element of it. We understand what birth and death are to us, and we’re at peace with that understanding. How can I explain? So many of these things have no words, because we never had a need to describe them. The world is. The rakh
are.
That’s enough for us.”

“Humans struggle all their lives to achieve such acceptance,” he mused. “And rarely succeed.”

“I know. When I’m not filled with fury at their destructiveness—or amazement at their stupidity—I sometimes feel sorry for them. Is that what human religions address?”

“In part.”

“And yours?”

“In part.” He shifted his weight so that he was more comfortable. “How well do you understand the fae?”

“It’s part of us. Like the air we breathe. How can I divorce myself from it enough to answer you?”

“I meant, how well do you understand what it is to
humans?”

Her lips curled in a scornful smile. “Your brains are a chaotic mess. That makes the fae a chaotic mess when it responds to you. Right?”

“Damn close,” he muttered. “Look. If a tribe of rakh live in a land where water’s been scarce, if they and their mounts go thirsty, if the plants themselves need rainfall to survive ... what happens?”

She shrugged. “It rains.”

“All right. Why? Because living things
need,
and that need affects the fae, and the fae alters the laws of probability, making rain more likely ... are you with me?”

She nodded.

“Now, consider the human brain. Three distinct levels of functioning, myriad separate parts, each with its own way of reasoning—if reasoning it can be called—some by pure instinct, some by intelligence, some by methods so abstract we have no way of even describing them. All interconnected in such a way that a single thought, a single
need,
can awaken a thousand responses. Is there drought in the land? One part thirsts. One part wishes for rain. One part fears that rain will never come. One part thinks that if death by thirst is close by, it ought to indulge itself in every pleasure it can. One is angry at nature for starving it, and translates that anger into other things. One channels its fear into violence, in the hope that by redirecting its terror it need not face it head on. One is joyful because enemies are dying also, and another feels that death by dehydration is nature’s just reward for some transgression, real or imagined, which it committed. All of that at once, inside one human head. Little wonder your people consider it chaotic. There’s a type of doctor whose only purpose is to help humans wade through that mess and come to terms with who and what they are. An understanding your people take for granted.

“So the fae responds to us, just like it responds to you. But it doesn’t recognize that all these levels are integral parts of the same being, it just takes the cue nearest at hand and responds to it. At least that’s how we understand it. With some people the response falls into a predictable pattern—they can always control it, they can never control it, the fae responds to fears, or to hopes, or to hates ... but with most people the response is utterly random.

“We do know that religious images are particularly volatile. So much so that over a hundred gods and messiahs appeared in the first twenty years after the Landing. Those were mere illusions; they had little substance and no power of their own. Reflections of mankind’s need for divine reassurance, no more. But as generation after generation poured their hopes and their fears and their dreams into such images, they gained in strength. They gained in power. They took on the personae that man ascribed to them, and came to believe in their own existence. We know that some of the colonists believed in a god-born messiah who would come and save them. The result was twenty false messiahs, each one more convincing than the last. Each one a construct of the fae, who blindly gave us what we wanted or feared the most. And of course they all fed on us, in one way or another. That’s what constructs do: they feed on their source. That’s why even the pleasant ones are so terribly dangerous.

“There was a time called the Dark Ages, when terror and havoc reigned. Fortunately, there were still a few men and women with clear enough vision to realize that
something
must be done ... something to mold the human imagination so that it ceased to be its own worst enemy. Thus the Revival was born, an experiment in rigid social structure based upon traditional Earth-values. It was moderately successful. And the Church was founded. A small movement at first, barely of consequence, which taught that the God of Earth was the only divine creature worthy of worship. Because that one God was a concept so vast, so omnipotent, that not all the fae on Erna could mimic it.

“And then along came one very gifted man who said, what if we take this concept one step further? What if we mold this faith so that it channels our energies creatively, so that it
creates for
us the world we want?—You must understand, no one had ever thought on that scale before. No one had ever conceived of manipulating the fae as he planned to do: by manipulating humanity’s collective consciousness, so that the fae was forced to respond. It was a brilliant vision, unparalleled in scope. It’s the cornerstone of my faith.”

“You’re talking about your Prophet.”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“Gerald Tarrant.”

He winced. “In his life—his natural life—that’s what he was to us. He took our prayers and rewrote them, until every word served his purpose. Every phrase. He redesigned every rite and every symbol—even dictated the relative lack of symbology which is the hallmark of our faith—so that with every prayer they voiced, with every breath they drew, the worshipers of the One God would reinforce the power of that vision. If there were enough believers, he taught, and if their faith were strong enough, the very nature of this world could be altered, in accordance with his vision.”

“Which was?”

He paused for a moment, arranging his thoughts. How long had it been since he had tried to explain his faith in language so simple? And yet if she were to travel safely among them she must have that knowledge. Toshida’s manner had made that clear.

“The goal was threefold,” he said at last. “One: To unify man’s faith, so that millions of souls might impress the fae with the same image in unison. Two: To alter man’s perception of the fae—to distance him from that power—thus weakening the link which permitted it to respond to him so easily. This meant a god who wouldn’t make appearances on demand, nor provide easy miracles. It meant hardship and it meant sacrifice. But he believed that in the end it would save us, and permit us to regain our technological heritage. Three: To safeguard man’s spirit while all this was taking place, so that when at last we cast off the shackles of this planet and rejoined our kin among the stars, we wouldn’t discover that in the process we had become something other than human. Something less than we would want to be.” He paused, considering. “I think in some ways that last one’s the hardest part. But I believe it’s the most important.”

“So what happened?” she pressed.

“Humankind learned the lesson too well. Because if man could make a true God in his image, why couldn’t he create an obliging godling with even less effort?
What you worship shall come to exist,
the Prophet wrote.
The power of your faith will give your dreams substance.
And so it was. A thousand selfish men designed their own prayers and their own psalms and gave birth to a thousand godlings, each with its own petty domain, each feeding on man while serving his earthly desires. Even as the Church grew in strength, this trend continued, until there were over a hundred tiny states with their own pet deities, their own claim to power. So we went to war: man’s final recourse when diplomacy fails him. It was a disaster. Oh, if it had been a clean and glorious conflict, filled with images of faith and capped by a clear-cut victory, it might have stirred men’s hearts and won them to our side. It wasn’t. It was a bloody mess that spanned three centuries, and it ended only when we bit off more than we could chew and tried to do battle with the fae itself—or rather, with the evil the fae had spawned. Our power base destroyed, our precious image sullied, we crept back to our churches and our pews to lick our wounds in private.”

“And now?”

He shut his eyes. “We do what we can, Hesseth. We still serve the same dream, but defeat has taught us patience. We no longer see the Prophet’s vision as the end of a neat progression that’ll be consummated in our lifetimes, but as an ideal state that may not be realized for centuries yet. For tens of centuries. Except here,” he whispered, and he glanced toward Toshida’s ship. “Isolated, unified, devout ... they may have accomplished what the west failed to do. By establishing a state free of pagan influence, by raising their children in unquestioning faith .... what power, Hesseth! It could alter the world. It may already have begun to.”

“And Tarrant?”

He stiffened at the sound of the name. “Cast out by his own creation,” he said sharply. “The Church knew that it would never alter the fae’s response to man until it had done away with private sorcery ... and he couldn’t give that up. Not even to save his own soul.” He drew in a deep breath of cool night air, exhaled it slowly. “He tried to do away with Hell, you know. Excess philosophical baggage, he called it. Detrimental to our cause. He erased it from all the texts, expunged it from the liturgy. They put it back. The habits of Earth were too deeply ingrained, the image of divine judgment too comforting for the righteous. In the end he lost that battle.”
And so much more
....

“And does he still believe in your Church?”

“He claims he still serves it. I fail to see how. I think that in the end he’s unwilling to let go of what he created, or admit that it defeated him. He’s vain, Hesseth, very vain, and the Church was his ultimate masterpiece. Sheer ego won’t let him abandon it, even when it damns him with all its strength. Which is part and parcel of his madness.”

“And what about your own sorcery? How does that fit in?”

He shut his eyes.
Isn’t that the question? How would Toshida answer it, I wonder?
“Everything I do is done in the name of God, drawing on that Power for strength. Our Church—the Western Matriarchy—believes that such a Working is compatible with our faith. Others disagree. And here....”

Here that issue never came up. Here they didn’t have to compromise
. It was a sobering thought indeed. And he felt a delicate chill run down his spine at the thought.
I’ve never drawn on the fae in my own name, or used it for my private benefit. But will that matter to these people? Will they recognize such fine distinctions?

“We’ll have to wait and see,” he whispered. Looking out at the foreign ship once more. Wondering about the land that had spawned it. The faith that drove it. Wondering ... and worrying.

“You know,” Hesseth said quietly, “I don’t envy your species.”

Yeah,
he thought.
Doesn’t that say it all?

They placed bets on the nature of Mercia: where it was, how large it was, how important it was in the scheme of things. Jones Hast made a crude copy of Tarrant’s survey map and pinned it to the outer wall of the cabin section, along with a sharpened pencil. Passengers and crew were invited to mark their guesses and—for ten Faraday dollars or its equivalent—register them with the captain. Two dozen sets of initials now marked the crude reproduction, most of them clustered about the mouth of the inland sea, or fringing the two rivers that emptied their waters into it. Where was Toshida’s capital city most likely to be located? With as little information as they had it was hard to say. He sought out Rasya’s mark, found it sketched in darkly some miles south of a vast delta. The location seemed a little strange to him, but he knew Rasya well enough to suspect that her guess was founded on a sound understanding of what that shoreline was and what it might become. He even put ten dollars of his own on the line, betting that she was right.