“You’re joking.”
“No sir. The bishop was quite explicit.”
Stupefied and disbelieving, I undo the chin strap and lift the instrument from my skull. I begin to tuck it under my arm, but the constable reaches out and takes it from me.
“This is insane,” I tell him. Without the helmet I’m as blind and deaf as any heathen. “I’ve done nothing wrong. What possible reason—”
The constable at the wheel turns us left onto a new track. The other puts his hand on my shoulder, and firmly turns me around.
Golgotha Plaza. Of course.
This is where the Godless come to die. The loss of my helmet is moot here; no one feels the presence of the Lord in this place. Our cart slides silently past the ranks of the heretics and the demon-possessed on their crosses, their eyes rolled back in their heads, bloody rivulets trickling from the spikes hammered through their wrists. Some have probably been here since before Trajan died; crucifixion could take days even in the days before anesthetics, and now we are a more civilized nation. We do not permit needless suffering even among our condemned.
It’s an old trick, and a transparent one; many prisoners, paraded past these ranks, have chosen to cooperate before interrogation even begins. Do these two think I don’t see through them? Do they think I haven’t done this myself, more times than I can count?
Some of the dying cry out as we pass—not with pain, but with the voices of the demons in their heads. Even now, they preach. Even now, they seek to convert others to their Godless ways. No wonder the Church damps this place—for what might a simple man think, feeling the Divine Presence while hearing sacrilege?
And yet, I almost can feel God’s presence. It should be impossible, even if the constables hadn’t confiscated my helmet. But there it is: a trickle of the Divine, like a thin, bright shaft of sunlight breaking through the roof of a storm. It doesn’t overpower; God’s presence does not flood through me as it did earlier. But there is comfort, nonetheless. He is everywhere. He is even here. We do not banish Him with damper fields, any more than we turn off the sun by closing a window.
God is telling me, Have strength. I am with you.
My fear recedes like an ebbing tide. I turn back to my escorts and smile; God is with them too, if they’d only realize it.
But I don’t believe they do. Something changes in their faces when they look at me. The last time I turned to face them, they were merely grim and uncooperative.
Now, for some reason, they almost look afraid.
They take me to the temple, but not to the bishop. They send me through the tunnel of light instead. They tell me it is entirely routine, although I went through the tunnel only four months ago and am not due again for another eight.
My armor is not returned to me afterwards. Instead, they escort me into the bishop’s sanctum, through an ornate doorway embellished with the likeness of a fiery cross and God’s commandment to Constantine: In hoc signo vinces. In this sign, conquer.
They leave me alone, but I know the procedure. There are guards outside.
The sanctum is dark and comforting, all cushions and velvet drapes and mahogany bones. There are no windows. A screen on one wall glows with a succession of volumetric images. Each lingers for a few moments before dissolving hypnotically into the next: the Sinai foothills; Prolinius leading the charge against the Hindus; the Holy Grotto itself, where God showed Moses the Burning Bush, where He showed all of us the way of the Spirit.
“Imagine that we had never found it.”
I turn to find the bishop standing behind me as if freshly materialized. He holds a large envelope the color of ivory. He watches me with the faintest trace of a smile on his lips.
“Teacher?” I say.
“Imagine that Constantine never had his vision, that Eusebius never sent his expedition into Sinai. Imagine that the Grotto had never been rediscovered after Moses. No thousand-year legacy, no technological renaissance. Just another unprovable legend about a prophet hallucinating in the mountains, and ten commandments handed down with no tools to enforce them. We’d be no better than the heathens.”
He gestures me towards a settee, a decadent thing, overstuffed and wine-colored. I do not wish to sit, but neither do I wish to give offense. I perch carefully on one edge.
The bishop remains standing. “I’ve been there, you know,” he continues. “In the very heart of the Grotto. Kneeling in the very place Moses Himself must have knelt.”
He’s waiting for a response. I clear my throat. “It must have been…indescribable.”
“Not really.” He shrugs. “You probably feel closer to God during your morning devotionals. It’s…unrefined, after all. Raw ore. Astounding enough that a natural formation could induce any kind of religious response, much less one consistent enough to base a culture on. Still, the effect is…weaker than you might expect. Overrated.”
I swallow and hold my tongue.
“Of course, you could say the same thing about the religious experience in principal,” he continues, blandly sacrilegious. “Just an electrical hiccough in the temporal lobe, no more divine than the force that turns compass needles and draws iron filings to a magnet.”
I remember the first time I heard such words: with the rest of my crèche, just before our first Communion. It’s like a magic trick, they said. Like static interfering with a radio. It confuses the part of your brain that keeps track of your edges, of where you stop and everything else begins—and when that part gets confused, it thinks you go on forever, that you and creation are one. It tricks you into believing you’re in the very presence of God. They showed us a picture of the brain sitting like a great wrinkled prune within the shadowy outline of a human head, arrows and labels drawing our attention to the relevant parts. They opened up wands and prayer caps to reveal the tiny magnets and solenoids inside, all the subtle instrumentality that had subverted an entire race.
Not all of us got it at first. When you’re a child, electromagnet is just another word for miracle. But they were patient, repeating the essentials in words simple enough for young minds, until we’d all grasped the essential point: we were but soft machines, and God was a malfunction.
And then they put the prayer caps on our heads and opened us to the Spirit and we knew, beyond any doubting, that God was real. The experience transcended debate, transcended logic. There was no room for argument. We knew. Everything else was just words.
Remember, they said afterwards. When the heathens would tell you our God is a lie, remember this moment.
I cannot believe that the bishop is playing the same games with me now. If he is joking, it is in very bad taste. If he is testing my conviction he falls laughably short. Neither alternative explains my presence here.
But he won’t take silence for an answer: “Don’t you agree?” he presses.
I tread carefully. “I was taught that the Spirit lives within iron filings and compass needles as much as in our minds and our hearts. That makes it no less Divine.” I take a breath. “I mean no disrespect, Teacher, but why am I here?”
He glances at the envelope in his hand. “I wished to discuss your recent…exemplary performance.”
I wait, not taken in. My guards did not treat me as an exemplary performer.
“You,” he continues, “are why we prevail against the heathens. It’s not just the technology that the Spirit provides, it’s the certainty. We know our God. He is empirical, He can be tested and proven and experienced. We have no doubt. You have no doubt. That is why we have been unstoppable for a thousand years, that is why neither Backland spies nor heathen flying machines nor the very breadth of an ocean will keep us from victory.”