She held me close. "I know you won't. I won't let you." And then she added, "Please, Jim, let's wait and see what we find in Japura."
The tension in her voice was unmistakable. She was terrified for me. Not half as terrified as I was myself. But some things you have to do. You just have to.
On their own world, the gastropedes are probably nocturnal creatures. The problem with this designation is that the conditions on Earth are apparently so different from those obtained on Chton that a complete adaptation seems to be impossible.
We do know that the gastropedes are most active under conditions of reduced sunlight: late afternoon, twilight, evening, and moonlit nights. Current evidence suggests that they prefer dusk and twilight hours in particular, but this is not to be taken as the final word on the subject.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 59
Wild Willie
"Organized religion is for the symbol-minded. A holy war is a clash of symbols. No idle worshiping aloud."
-SOLOMON SHORT
Instead of heading straight for Japura, we turned south.
The new plan was to keep the airship away from the mandala. It was too distracting a presence-the Heisenberg effect-and we didn't want to risk another nightmare like Coari.
As much as we bated the worms, now more than ever, we needed to remind ourselves that the mandate of this mission was not destruction, but knowledge. The most powerful weapon we would ever have against the Chtorran infestation would be our thorough understanding of the deadly red ecology.
We needed to observe the ordinary workings of life in a mandala settlement. Now we knew that we couldn't simply park ourselves in a Chtorran sky; these creatures were too observant, too aware. And, when they gathered in groups, their collective intelligence-as well as their collective horror-seemed magnified.
The new plan was to anchor fifty klicks south and drop all our probes by flyer. This would seriously limit the number of units we could plant. We were still trying to decide if it was safe to risk a dark flyover on a moonless night to drop the bulk of the monitors. My only concern was the possibility of human beings living in the mandala. If we could get them out…
On the other hand, did I really want to save the lives of human beings who were willing to live with worms?
The parents, no. But the children deserved a chance.
And then I thought about the pictures from Coari.
I wondered if the children were even human anymore.
But then again… were any of the rest of us all that human? Who knew? Who was to judge? And by what standards?
I knew one thing-I was in serious need of a spiritual recharge. The events of the past two days had left me twitching. The events of the past ten days had devastated me. The events of the past six years had destroyed my innocence.
I found myself wandering the corridors of the Bosch, up and down from one floor to the next-all the way aft to Lieutenant Siegel's no-longer-secret operations bay, all the way forward to the observation lounge in the nose of the aircraft. Now that the Brazilians were effectively out of the loop, we had a much different sense of purpose.
Somehow, I ended up in one of the airship's twelve theaters. It was linked via satellite to the Global Network. There was always something playing here, if not live, then via taped replay. I wandered in and sat down without even looking to see what program, what channel, what network. I just found a seat in the dark and stared unconsciously forward.
During the Training, Foreman had said, "There are no accidents. You get exactly what you set out to get." He must have been right. I set out looking for spiritual guidance, but what I got instead was Wild Bill Aycock.
"Wild Bill" Aycock was the most ferocious, fire-slinging, hell and damnation, fear-of-God, rabble-rousin' orator since ol' Dan'l Webster wrassled the devil two falls out of three for custody of hell. His face filled the huge screen, giving me an unappetizingly close view of the craggy terrain of "Wild Willie's" mountainous features. Some people thought he was handsome. I didn't see it myself. On this screen, I thought his pores were too large.
"People ask me-" he was saying, in that familiar seductive rasp of his, "-how can I believe in God when the Earth is being eaten alive? How can I have faith? What is there to have faith in?" With both hands he grabbed hold of the music stand that he used to hold his notes and leaned intensely forward, leaning so far toward the camera that he seemed like a giant grotesque balloon expanding into the room. I sat back in my seat. Stereoscopy has its disadvantages.
"Y'know-" Preacher Aycock said, abruptly conversational and straightening up just a little. "I can understand the reasons for their doubt. Yes, I can.
"You turn on the television or you pick up a newspaper, and all that you find are the endless stories of death and dying and despair. We wallow in the dreadful news, all the sickening and disease, the hellacious purple plants, the ravenous red worms. Day after day, we are assaulted by the devil's own host of malformed and malicious mites and miseries tormenting our spirits. The pictures are endless, and how can anyone think anything but the darkest of thoughts?
"Where's God, you say? How can God allow this? Can these unholy creatures possibly be the work of the same God who created the whispering beauty of the towering redwoods, or the awesome majesty of the great leviathans of the deep? Could the same God who created the intricacies of the honeybee and the inspirational labors of the common ant also be so deranged as to create such pestilence and foulness that despoils the planet now?
"You know, friends, I've talked about God's great plan since the first day I began this ministry. Yes, I have. And I have never lost faith that God does indeed have a plan.
"But-let me tell you-I'm also humble enough to know that the architecture of God's great plan is far beyond my simple ability to understand. The scale of God's great plan is far beyond the ability of any mere human being to grasp. And the details are so far beyond our comprehension that it's the height of vanity even to make assumptions.
"At best-at very best-all that any of us can ever be is just a tiny little cog on a tiny little wheel somewhere in God's great machine; but even that should be enough, even for the most ambitious of us. We should sink to our knees in awe and gratefulness for even being allowed to know that such an awesome plan exists.
"Now I know there's a paradox here. How can we serve God's plan if we cannot understand it? How can we serve? That, my friend-is where your faith comes in. Yes, that's where your faith is wanted and needed and absolutely demanded. Oh, yes.
"Now, I also know that the science boys have all kinds of four-dollar words for what's happening here. Fancy explanations that are so exquisitely written and voiced that they're just about impossible for the average person-you and me-to understand. Sometimes it seems that the science boys are almost as impossible to understand as God. But I'll put my faith in God, because I know he knows what he's doing."
Wild Willie paused to take a drink of water. I wondered if he'd been trained by Foreman. You never knew. He looked around at his audience and gave them his three-million-dollar grin; his craggy-faced, Roman-nosed, rugged-cheeked, chin-augmented, tooth-capped, colored-contact-lensed, hair-implanted, digitally enhanced grin. The man looked like Abraham Lincoln-only better. In his own magnificent way. I suppose, he was gorgeous. I had heard once that during his heyday before the plagues, he used to receive over a hundred marriage proposals a week.
"Now, I would not presume to speak for God," he continued. "No, I would not. There are some mistakes that I will not make-and presuming on the Good Lord's prerogatives is one of them.
"Oh, I admit that I am sometimes a vain and arrogant man. You've heard the jokes about my nose and my hair and my eyes. In my younger days, I listened to the TV advisors who told me I could serve my ministry best if I looked my best. I made a mistake. I listened and I stopped loving myself like the Good Lord wanted me to-but I know better now. I know that the mere flesh and clay that we clothe our spirits in has nothing to do with the true beauty of the inner soul; and in fact, the curse of physical beauty is that it distracts us from seeing the real person within, whether that person is truly good or truly evil. Physical beauty is not the evidence of spiritual beauty. I know that now. Unfortunately, I cannot undo this mistake and I have to live with it. I see it every morning when I look in the mirror, the evidence that one terrible day, I actually lost faith in God's great plan for me.