seem strange that eternal salvation for the many, in a hereafter which they are
asked to accept on mere assurances, should be attainable in no other way than by
their enduring hardships gratefully and laboring their lives in wretchedness for
the further enrichment of a pious few who exhibit a suspiciously unholy interest
in the quality of their own herenow?” Neither Dornvald nor his companions
mentioned the Skybeings, and Thirg followed their example.
When the party left to continue its journey, the garrison commander assigned a
detachment of troops to escort it to the city of Menassim, apparently because
the Waskorians had been causing trouble again in an area that the road passed
through. The Waskorians, Dornvald explained to Thirg, were an alliance of
extremist sects who denounced as sinful and decadent the liberties that had come
with Kleippur’s rule and were committed to bringing down the regime in order to
return the land to its old ways. The rulers of Kroaxia and Serethgin had been
quick to exploit the resentments of the Waskorians, and supplied them with
weapons and fomented uprisings. The freedom to earn their salvation in their own
way if they thought they needed to be saved from something wasn’t sufficient for
the sects, it seemed; everyone else, willingly or otherwise, had to be saved
their way too.
The remainder of the journey passed without incident, however, possibly because
of the escorts. Slowly the rugged border country fell behind and was replaced by
hills of thin pipeline, power cable, and latticework scrub, giving way to open
slopes of bare ice higher up. After leaving the hills, the riders passed through
many miles of dense forest, and the first edge of dark was showing low in the
sky before signs of robeing habitation began increasing noticeably. At first
isolated homes and then villages appeared; at the same time the landscape took
on a tidier appearance with lubricant-fractionation columns standing in
well-kept rows, neatly cultivated nut, bolt, and bearing orchards, and rich
fields of electrolytic precipitation baths. Dornvald advised Thirg that they
were approaching the outskirts of Menassim.
It no longer came as any surprise to Thirg to see that the reactions of the
populace showed no signs of the fear and hatred manifested by downtrodden slaves
encountering their oppressors; on the contrary, the soldiers were greeted with
smiles and friendly waves, and children in the villages ran to the roadside to
watch them pass. The adults seemed healthy and well plated; they were neatly and
adequately dressed; and their houses were trim and in good repair. It was a
strange kind of “living in perpetual terror” that produced such results; he
thought to himself.
The city too, though bustling and crowded, was clean and seemed prosperous: The
shops and stalls of the merchants were amply stocked, and the wares were of good
quality; the streets were paved and cleared of rubbish; and the taverns and
eating houses were noisy and busy. Other things that Thirg, who had tended to
avoid cities as much as possible in Kroaxia, would have considered inseparable
from the urban scene were conspicuous by their absence. There were no beggars or
derelicts to be seen pleading or picking a living from the gutters, and neither
did priests or nobles in tall headgear ride haughtily in six-legged carriages
behind burly servants wielding bludgeons to clear the way. There were no burned
or partly dissolved corpses on public display as a warning to others against
blasphemy and heresy; no lesser offenders being exhibited and tormented by mobs
in the marketplace; no penitents in emery cloth and carbon black confessing
their sins to the world from street corners; no ascetic monks shackled to
pillars for the length of a bright—no signs at all, in fact, of the holy and the
devout dreaming up what had always struck Thirg as ever more absurd ways to
degrade and debase themselves in order to prove themselves worthy creations of
an all-wise and all-benevolent Lifemaker whose judgment and disposition were
supposed to be capable of being influenced by such antics.
Nearer the center of the city the buildings became larger and taller, with
organically grown structures giving way to fabrications of welded blocks of cut