Remo made a face. “Chiun’s elderly gods sound downright plausible next to that yarn.”
“But whatever the nature of Sa Mangsang, there is a possibility that some of the peoples of the Polynesian islands did once know how to speak to him and lull him into a deeper state of unconsciousness,” Smith said. ‘It’s a slim hope.”
“It is no hope whatsoever,” Chiun declared.
“What other option do we have?” Mark Howard asked.
“We can go pay a housecall on the son of a squid,” Remo said. “That’s what I should have done at the beginning. After all, we’re old friends.”
This was the part of the story Smith had the most trouble believing. “Remo, it is possible that you met one of the sentinels of Sa Mangsang, not the actual entity? That creature was small enough that you could disable it.”
“I punched it in the nose. It was Sa Mangsang, all right, not his people. He was probably shrunken from much sleep and little food.”
“Yes, that is it, exactly,” Chiun said. “Now he has been feeding voraciously. Think of the human cattle who have been driven to him. He will be ten times the size he was when last you encountered him, when he was barely conscious.”
Remo Williams pictured a Sa Mangsang ten times bigger than the Sa Mangsang he had encountered under the ocean, years ago, during his Rite of Attainment. And if that Sa Mangsang had been drunk on sleep, what would a fully awake Sa Mangsang be like?
“You’re trying to scare me so I stay away,” Remo said when he felt Chiun’s eyes on him.
“You would be a fool to deliver yourself into its power.”
“On this point I agree,” Smith said. “You don’t know what could come of that.”
“But there’s nothing else we can do,” Remo said. “Are we just going to sit around and let all this happen?”
“For now, that is the best course of action,” Smith said.
“For now? As opposed to later? There is no later, Smitty!”
“For tonight,” Smith amended.
Remo shrugged. “Fine. Whatever.”
“I shall seek to learn more from the bird,” Chiun said. “It may yet have more to tell.”
“Yeah, I know what it’s going to tell you about,” Remo said. When they left the office they found poor old Mrs. Mikulka in a state of shock.
Remo gave her a smile. “You look a little flushed, Mrs. M.”
She was wringing her hands.
The bird winged to his shoulder and rode with Remo and Chiun down the stairs to the private wing of Folcroft. “You told that nice Mrs. M. the one about Delores, didn’t you?” he asked the macaw.
“She had a great big—”
Remo’s fingers clamped the parrot’s beak shut. “No, thanks. I’ve heard it.”
Chapter 30
Remo came into the main room of the Folcroft suite in his underwear, and lowered himself into a cross- legged sitting posture on a reed mat. He made less noise than the ladybug walking on the wall.
The old man appeared a moment later.
“Didn’t mean to wake you.”
Chiun made the smallest motion with his hand that told Remo his apology was unnecessary. Of course, he had hoped Chiun would hear his near-silent footsteps, even over the wild-boar racket of the old man’s own snoring. If asked, Chiun would have claimed he did not snore, so what could possibly have kept him from hearing Remo stomping around in the next room? It was the kind of Chiun-like logic that made sense if you would only let it.
Remo wished he could let it. He wanted the comfort of some kind of rationale for what he was experiencing.
“You are troubled.” Chiun descended into a sitting pose on a mat across from Remo, and the movement happened with all the disturbance and noise of drifting down.
“Tell me more about Cho-gye.”
Chiun considered this. “I do not think there is more to tell. You seek to understand the meaning of the tale of Cho-gye?”
“I seek to believe it,” Remo said.
“And to find comfort in that belief,” Chiun added.
“Yeah. I’m having a hard time with this, Little Father.”
“What this?”
“This failure.”
“What failure?”
“You know. My bad judgment call. I can’t stop thinking about what might have happened because I did the wrong thing. I know you think there’s a lesson in the story of Cho-gye that works for this situation. But I just don’t get it.”
Chiun nodded with his eyes. “You are a white. You are an American. You lack the ability to have faith.”
Remo knew this wasn’t Chiun’s typical bashing of things Caucasian and Western.
“It is the way of this world now,” Chiun continued. “Perhaps it is inevitable that faith is sacrificed to fact, until faith can no longer be tolerated, even in the absence of fact. The Emperor is a product of this era, old as he is. Despite all his years and all that he has witnessed, he will not allow himself to have faith. He believes in Sa Mangsang, here, in his core.” Chiun moved a hand to his abdomen. “But he will not allow himself to believe in Sa Mangsang here, in his mind, because he does not have the facts that make it plausible.”
Was Smitty really such a fool that he would allow himself to be blinded to the truth just because the truth was inexplicable by his data? Remo decided that Smitty was just that foolish.
“He lacks faith in himself,” Chiun added.
“He has faith in himself. Otherwise he wouldn’t be so damn stubborn about sticking to his guns.”
“No. What he believes here is a part of him.” Chiun motioned toward his stomach again: “That is where his instinct and his intuition are manifest. What he knows of Sa Mangsang in his head is only factious elements of truth that may or may not mean what they pretend to mean.”
Remo meditated on this for a moment. “Smitty lacks faith in his own gut feeling. If we all went with our gut feeling, the world would be a mess. We’d be animals.”
“We are not animals, and our instincts are not wholly animal, and our instincts are tempered with wisdom that an animal cannot possess. It is therefore not instinct.”
‘It’s faith,” Remo said, feeling a surge of pleasure as he understood the distinction, only to feel downcast again.
After a long moment, Chiun said, “You find no comfort in this. You know what faith is, but you do not know how to achieve faith. This is the symptom of the Western world—atheism or agnosticism. No one believes.”
“You can’t make yourself have faith. Not in Jewish carpenters or elder gods or even in yourself.”
“Those who need it turn in desperation to whatever storefront religion is close at hand. This explains the Church of Elvis.”
“I’m sort of desperate. Why can’t I bring myself to have faith in myself? Am I going to walk around for the rest of my life trying to believe in what I believe in?”
Chiun raised an eyebrow.
“Maybe I’m really just a grunt who’ll always need a CO making the decisions. You know, I’ve always felt like one of those guys who doesn’t get paid to think and it ticked me off. Even before CURE, I mean, and all these years with CURE. I finally arranged things so I do get paid to think and, surprise, surprise, I’m not very good at it.”
“No,” Chiun agreed, “you are not very good at it.”
Remo was taken aback. He had been insulted by Chiun a hundred times in just the past week, but somehow this comment came as a genuine slap in the face.
“Why?” he demanded. “What do you mean?”
Chiun raised one finger and his face broke into the smile of a child on a picnic. “There it is, Remo Williams.” Then he pointed his bony finger at Remo’s stomach.
What? Remo wanted to make the old man tell him what the hell he was talking about, and then he knew. He did have faith. A speck of it, sitting at the bottom of his bucket of self-defense. It was small, but hard as a diamond.