The idea of faith interested him, even fascinated him, not as an intellectual idea, not as a concept or some abstract theoretical framework, but as a way of controlling people, as a way of understanding and so manipulating them. As a flaw, in the end, as something which was wrong with others that was not wrong with him.
Sometimes he could not believe all the advantages other people seemed prepared to hand him. They had faith and so would do things that were plainly not in their own immediate (or, often, long-term) best interests, because they just believed what they had been told; they experienced altruism and so did things that, again, were not necessarily to their advantage; they had sentimental or emotional attachments to others and so could be coerced, once more, into doing things they would not have done otherwise. And — best of all, he sometimes thought — people were self-deceiving. They thought they were brave when they were really cowards, or imagined they could think for themselves when they most blatantly could not, or believed they were clever when they were just good at passing exams, or thought they were compassionate when they were just sentimental.
The real strength came from a perfectly simple maxim: Be completely honest with yourself; only ever deceive others.
So many edges! So many ways that people made his progress easier. If everybody he’d ever met and competed with and struggled against had been just like him in these respects he’d have had a much harder rise to power. He might not even have prevailed at all, because without all these advantages it largely came down to luck, and he might not have had sufficient.
In the old days he had once wondered how many of the Cessorian high command, his old bosses, really believed in the Truth. He strongly suspected that the higher you went, the greater grew the proportion of those who didn’t really believe at all. They were in it for the power, the glory, the control and the glamour.
Now he rarely thought about any of that. Now he would just assume that anybody in such a position would be completely and cynically self-interested and be mildly surprised and even slightly disgusted to find that any of them really did have genuine faith. The disgust would come from the feeling that the person concerned was letting down the side, and the suspicion that they would feel they were somehow — perversely — superior to their less-deluded peers.
“And so you really believe in all that? You really do?”
“Sir, of course, sir! It is the rational faith. Simple logic dictates. It is inescapable. You know this better than I, sir. Sir, I think you tease me.” The girl looked away, smiling down, coquettish, shy, perhaps a little alarmed, just possibly even daring to feel slightly insulted.
He reached out and took her hair, swinging her face round to his, a gold-dark silhouette against the sparse sprinkle of distant stars. “Child, I am not sure that in all my life I have ever teased. Not once.”
The girl did not seem to know what to say. She looked around, perhaps at the pale stars through the screen-glass, perhaps at the snow-white tumble of low-gee puff-bedding, perhaps at the shell of screens forming the walls of their little nest, surfaces on which startlingly detailed and inventive acts of sexuality were being enacted. Perhaps she looked at her two companions, both now curled and asleep.
“Well, then, sir,” she said at last, “not teased. I would not say you teased me. Perhaps rather that you make fun of me because you are so much more educated and clever than me.”
That, the Archimandrite thought, was perhaps more like it. But he still was not sure. Did this young thing still carry the Truth inside her, even after all the normal-span generations that had come and gone since he’d formally swept away all this nonsense?
In a way it didn’t matter in the slightest; as long as nobody ever began to use their religion to organise against him he could not care less what people really thought. Obey me, fear me. Hate me if you want. Don’t ever pretend to love me. That was all he asked of people. Faith was just another lever, like sentiment, like empathy, like love (or what people thought was love, what they claimed was love, the fanciful, maybe even dishonest bit that wasn’t lust, which was honest. And, of course, another lever).
But he wanted to know. A less civilised fellow in his situation would have considered having the girl tortured to find out the truth, but people being tortured over something like this soon ended up just telling you what they thought you wanted to hear — anything to get the pain to stop. He’d learned that quickly enough. There was a better way.
He reached for the pod’s remote control and adjusted the spin, creating the illusion of gravity once more. “Go on all fours in front of the window,” he told the girl. “It’s time again.”
“Sir, of course, sir.” The girl quickly assumed the position he wanted, crouched against the oncoming star field, seemingly fixed even though the pod was revolving. The brightest sun, screen dead-centre, was Ulubis.
Luseferous had had his genitals enhanced in all sorts of ways. One improvement was that he carried glands inside his body which allowed him to produce many different secretions which his ejaculate could then carry into the bodies of others (but whose effects he was proof against, obviously), including irritants, hallucinogens, cannabinoids, capsainoids, sleeping draughts and truth serums. He went briefly into the little-death little-trance, the petit mal which allowed him to select one of these, and chose the last-mentioned, the truth drug. He took the girl anally; it was faster-acting that way. And discovered that she really did believe in the Truth. Though it also emerged that she thought he was horribly ancient and weird-looking and a frightening, sick-minded old sadist and she absolutely hated being fucked by him.
He thought about inseminating her with thanaticin, or employing one of the physical options his remade penis made possible: the shaved horsetail, perhaps. Or just ejecting her into the vacuum and watching her die.
In the end Luseferous decided that letting her live with such constant degradation was punishment enough. He’d always said he preferred being despised, after all.
He would make her his favourite. Probably wise to put her on suicide watch, too.
* * *
The Dwellers held that the ability to suffer was what ultimately marked out sentient life from any other sort. They didn’t mean just the ability to feel physical pain, they meant real suffering, they meant the sort of suffering that was all the worse because the creature undergoing the experience could appreciate it fully, could think back to when it had not suffered so, look forward to when it might stop (or despair of it ever stopping — despair was a large component of this) and know that if things had been different it might not be suffering now. Brains required, see? Imagination. Any brainless thing with a rudimentary nervous system could feel pain. Suffering took intelligence.
Of course, Dwellers didn’t feel pain, and claimed never to suffer, except in the trivial sense of suffering fools because they were part of the family, or experiencing the deleterious physical and mental effects of a serious hangover. So, by their own reckoning, they weren’t really sentient. At which point the average Dweller, assuming without question that they were absolutely self-evidently the most sentient and intelligent things around in anybody’s neck of the woods, would just throw their spine-limbs out, shake their mantle ruff and start talking loudly about paradoxes.
He faced to spin, carried in the jet stream at five hundred kilometres per hour. Motionless. He side-slipped, found a small eddy, just a curl, a tiny yellow-white wisp a couple of klicks across in the great empty skies of orange and red and brown. He moved through the gas. It felt slick against the arrowhead’s skin. He let the eddy carry him round in a slow gyration for a while, then pointed down and fell, twisting slowly as he went, down through the hazes and the clouds and the slowly thickening weight and press of gas, down to where the temperature was suitable, where he levelled out and did something he had never done before; he opened the cover of the little gascraft and let the atmosphere in, let Nasqueron in, let it touch his naked human skin.