The Son of God had not spoken for a day. Now, suddenly awakened to the present by his vision, oblivious of his pain, he shouted wildly down at his kzin. “You reborn?”
“Ratcats iss live eleven lives?” The giant’s ears waggled in amusement as he used a monkey’s demeaning term for kzinti. He meant nine, but Hwass had never managed to master decimal mathematics. He got it garbled when he converted from base eight
“Born once of mother! Born twice of Christ!” shouted the hermit in explanation.
The kzin remained puzzled.
“Finagle’s censored balls! Are you a Christian convert? I’m trying to explain to myself what you’re doing! Crucifixion is a Christian sacrifice!”
“I iss Kdaptist,” explained Hwass patiently to his victim.
The hermit’s sight was wavering again. He followed his grandfather’s eyes to the St. Joachim cross of his hallucination. His dry lips were raving. “My grandfather warned me about people like you!” he screamed at the kzin. Then he was gone again into delirium and vision and revelation.
“Christians!” his grandfather was lecturing with a booming voice that traveled all the way from Munchen to the Wunderland backlands, “they delegate their wrong-doing to Christ who suffers for them in proxy ‘Let Christ do the suffering,’ that’s their motto. ‘Let Christ be punished in my place.’ Christ earns God’s grace the hard way, and all they have to do is drink Christ’s blood and eat His flesh on Sunday. Christians acquire God’s grace secondhand. For this service they are grateful and worship him. Been a popular sales pitch for thousands of years. Christians are the ones who get indignant when they get nailed to a cross; they think God’s been falling down on His job and hire a lawyer to sue Him.”
High on his cross the hermit was in a rage of indignation. He wasn’t Christ! It wasn’t his job! Why should he have to suffer? It was sacrilege!
Below, Hwass was busy honing a theological point. Since God had granted to these animals the gift of superluminal communication, surely their awfulest sins had the superluminal ability to fly from all the realms of man, here, to the poultice Hwass had made from the body of the Son of God.
Hwass had completed his mask. Wearing it, he was permitted to gaze directly into the eyes of the Son of God. He smelled the fear and the agony. The true face was tormented in pam. Sometimes the pain was so great that the Son fainted but then he would slump and choke, unable to fill his lungs, and had to awaken, to stiffen his legs so that he could breathe. The sacrifice was working. The sins of mankind were arriving, a new one with each gasp and groan, and with them the punishment that went with sin. Kdapt had truly mastered the nature of the simian form and mind.
St. Joachim’s was gone but the grandfather had brought with him a spinning Munchen hotel, made shabby by the fist of the kzinti occupation, horribly fuzzed by the delirium. Grandpa was trying to convince his grandson not to abandon his first wife. The guy could be a bore! What did it matter so many years too late? Cindy-belle was bones under a kzin factory. You can’t go back. Finagle, what did all that matter when a kzin had you nailed to a cross? Die. I want to die.
“You can blame Cindy-belle all you want, son, for your own incompetence. It’s a painless way to go, top off all your sins on to her, to make her guilty, to attribute to her the source of your own stupidities. That will make you feel good. You’ll be absolved. You’ll be saved-for the moment. But Finagle knows it won’t do you any good in the long run. Your sins aren’t transferable. In the long run you get nailed to your own cross. Christ never saved a single soul but his own.”
Shut up, old man! The universe wasn’t supposed to be literal.
The grandfather held tightly to his grandson’s hand and they were back in Munchen with the painted wooden Christ. “He wanted to take on the world’s sins. He wanted to suffer in your place, and he suffered. But he didn’t save anyone. A sin is something even Jesus can’t take from you. A sin is something you can’t give away. You can’t even run away from it.”
Shut up. Let me die. He was dying of regret. I could be with Cindy-belle now, and the boy grown up, and my mad kzin would have found someone else, some other sinner. Too soon old; too late wise. Why didn’t the raving old ghost just shut up!
From parched lips almost too stiff to speak, he asked for water. If the damn ratcat had read the Bible, like he claimed, he’d hold up a rag soaked in vinegar. The man fainted. He woke. He found a cup of stream water in front of his face… attached to a pole that went all the way down there to a crazy kzin wearing the outsized mask of a man’s face. Why water and not vinegar? Did the rat kzin want him alive to suffer longer? He smiled through cracked lips. He was warm and cozy. Pain was its own anesthetic. He was floating. Still, he wanted the water and slurped at it awkwardly. The water revived him but he wished it hadn’t because his grandfather was still chattering away. That damn old man was never going to give him any peace; somber advice right up to the end. They were having beer in a trunkshuppen in wartime Munchen.
“The road you’re taking, son, running away from your wife, letting father handle it-that leads nowhere but to death. No matter where you run, son, all you’ll find there is your own deathbed, and the faster you run, the quicker you’ll get there.”
The cantankerous hermit was choking again. This time he was grown-up and at the end of his life. When he tried to stiffen, his legs refused to obey. He couldn’t breathe with limp legs and he couldn’t talk his legs into helping him. He was pleading with his legs to raise his body when he blacked out.
The kzin was watching intently.
At the exact moment of death the man-beasts would all be saved, at least temporarily. Every man, across all the realms of men, would be in a state of grace. Their suffering would die as the Son died. And God would no longer be distracted by the pain emanating from their multiple true-shapes.
He prayed. Grant the Bearded God tranquility! The Great God’s Patriarchal courage and bravery and strength were about to be restored by the sacrifice of His Son. Rejuvenated, He would be alert and ready to listen to all who called upon Him, not just the whining of His favorites.
The body on the cross slumped, convulsed, was still. Hwass turned to the smaller cross, God’s antenna. Now! The mask respecting the true-form was firmly upon his muzzle. He composed himself. In the air were the songs of heaven and the smells of glory. His hunter’s senses felt the full attention of God. He delivered only one request, a resonant, powerful request, carefully phrased in the purrs of the Dominated Tense of the Hero’s Tongue:
“Mighty Patriarch, Son of the Grandfather, and Father of the Son,” he began formally, “the aroma of Your piss emanates from every star. As Your feces was dropped into the mud of Earth to bring forth the true-shape, I throw my soul to the mud of Kzin to bring forth loyalty to God’s purpose. Obedient children I promise You.”
Hwass was remembering a lost life on the sheep estates of Wunderland. “A fanged dog may be ugly in Your eyes. An untamed dog may kill sheep. But a fanged dog who has been bred to the faith is a shepherd.”
Then he made his plea. “Place in my loyal claws the hypershunt drive so that my brave kzinti may move freely to their destiny! Let us guide Your true-shaped children. We will discipline their behavior! In the whole of the galaxy, You command no greater race than the race of Heroes. Use us. I ask no more.”
After a respectful silence, Hwass-Hwasschoaw feasted upon the body of the Son of God so that he might share in the grace of the true-form, as God had commanded in Matthew 26:26, and drank of the blood, all of it, which was shed for the remission of sins as commanded in Matthew 26:27-28.