“You iss not pray. You iss take all mens sins to your soul with courage of true warrior, thus relieving God of His grief for mens. You iss be guilty for all sins. You iss accept all punishment. You iss forgive all mens their transgressions, wipe them clean with your suffering and make God glad again. This iss duty I require of Son of God.”
While the trussed Son of God peered helplessly into the gloom, the devout kzin used his torch to fell a straight tree. Flaking muck flickered on slick fur. The giant cut his log into two parts. He notched them and lashed together a sturdy cross. He measured the man’s arm span while the man pleaded hysterically, now aware of his fate. Holes were drilled at the right place on the crossbeam. Holes were drilled in his wrists which carefully avoided all major arteries and veins. The kzin used ironwood pegs to secure the Son of God to the cross and raised him to the night, higher than a kzin’s eye. It began to rain.
In the pouring rain, Hwass cheerfully cut and built two smaller crosses which he erected to the right and left of the crucified Son of God, one for the invisible Grandfather and the other to call God to the scene so that He would know He was wanted. When the clouds began to clear, Beta was rising through the misty frees and the hermit, in the first delirium of his pain, could actually see his enemy sitting on the wet moor weaving—what was it? a basket?
Hwass-Hwasschoaw was weaving a human mask of pliant bark to replace the mask of human skin he had not been able to bring with him. Basket weaving was one of the skills he had ordered his father’s slaves to teach him as a youth. His patriarch had not allowed him to observe a slave without learning how to do all that the slave was doing. Once he had killed one of his father’s metal-working slaves for refusing to teach him the art of variable alloying. His father commended his act by sharing in the bloody meal—even though he had lost a valuable properly.
It was predestined from birth that Hwass was to become Patriarch’s Eye, an unmentionable name he was to carry in priority to all other social names he might be known by. Eyes sometimes led quiet lives of observance. Sometimes their lives became livery affairs of survival by wit where even the most impractical skill might be the key to survival. His father had ordered him to learn everything.
While he wove, he recalled his father’s words. “A master who cannot do what his slaves do has become like an unskilled animal. A kzin is owned by his slaves if they are more clever than he.” His father was born on W’kkai of the Kzin aristocracy, nominally a member of the W’kkai aristocracy, but more of Kzin than of W’kkai. He had only contempt for the W’kkai habit of letting their slaves be the custodians of their gestalt.
He did not have to kill his father’s basket weavers for they were enthusiastic in teaching him all they knew. The mask shaped up nicely. The skin was finely woven with shaped cheekbones and cleft chin and protruding eyebrows. The eyes were of stream-polished quartz. The hair was of fine plant fiber which he pounded clean while the Son of God was dying with his awful burden of sin.
Day came and night, and the pallor of Beta, and the dawn of Alpha. In his delirium the hermit was taken to a ghostly remembrance of München in the spring of a year when Beta was an evening star. It cast shadows the length of Karl-Jorge Avenue and set the steel steeple of St. Joachim’s cathedral a shimmer against a purpling sky. Some kind of Mass was gathering, and his grandfather, whom he loved far more than his father, was holding on to his hand with the kind of vigor that adults use to protect children from Calvinists, nearby kzin, and other evils.
The hermit was remembering this now because as a child this was the first time he had ever seen a statue—man nailed in agony to a cross. The cross was larger than life-size and it rose above the massive entrance to St. Joachim’s. He had not asked his grandfather about it but his grandfather had sensed his consternation and volunteered an explanation.
“Son. Don’t be scared. The kzinti don’t do that to people. Crucifixion is peculiarly Christian—the kzinti have only been here nine years; they haven’t had the time to be reborn again. Give them fifty years to convert and then we’ll get some real atrocities.”
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 München 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 pain. 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 München 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.”