“Allah wouldn’t send you P.O. Wodehouse to write funny stories,” Plum answered. Even as his spirits launched upward on the giddy wings of hope, he recoiled against the grandeur of Hakim’s concepts.
“You must have faith! The universe is broken,” Hakim answered. “Logic demands that all the casual chains should cycle beginning to end, in a round of time, and each link of that round chain-, when you come to it, is the same link as eighty billion years before. The same Hakim meeting the same P.G. Wodehouse, but thanks to Allah, the doom of that eternal cycle cycle of Big Bang and collapse is not for us. The universe of Physics has cracked, and His grace leaks in through His instruments. I know nothing except what I experience—I am a vessel
of mat grace. I trust in it. I use it. When I was younger, I used it very badly, although grace has a way of making bad things good.
“I was not sure yesterday. You seemed very bad: a mocker. A man of un-Druze-like character hi a world that makes a joke of Druze beliefs. But now you can prove yourself. Come. We must whisper.”
Bending away from his guards into Plum’s hut, Hakim touched his finger to his lips. “This is a secret you will be unable to betray: my followers would kill you at the suggestion of the truth. Nine hundred years before your time, they say I left Cairo and fled my honors and titles. I wrote letters from hiding the next three decades. These letters instructed them in their religion. Lies, lies! But naturally I’d be interested in reading them myself! To know what I said! On Resurrection Day we all woke on Riverworld, naked and bookless, and I have no good way to quote myself.”
Hakim went to the window to make sure no one was listening. After a moment he came back. “Hence my interest in paper and ink. All I need do—all I can do, is cause to have published as much of those texts as my elders here can remember. We are all enthusiastic about this project, for various reasons, mine being survival.
“Survival? But—”
“I know I’d resurrect if all they did was kill me. Consider that they could do worse. Consider also: I have not died once since the morning in Cairo when I ‘went into occultation.’ I’m not as used to the idea as you are. But I’m not merely a coward who plays a bully hi self-defense: the fealty of these people gives me wonderful opportunities. What I told you is true. Unless I’m
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insane to say so, I am one of Allah’s vessels of grace. I was born to it, and I have felt the power in me.”
Plum cleared his throat. Why me? he thought to himself. If this cove unbosoms himself to every customer he meets within forty-eight hours… One possibility had to be that he really was insane.
Fortunately, Hakim kept up his end of the conversation without Wodehouse’s active help. “In your life on Earth, al-Hakim bi’Amr Allah meant nothing to you. You never heard of me before yesterday.”
“Er, ah… I guess—”
“Few people have, outside the Jebel Druze. Yet until my sister had me assassinated I was the Lenin of my age. I ruled from Cairo, and Cairo was as great a city as Byzantium had ever been. Greater than Damascus, much greater than Rome!
“Being a vessel of God, I hated religion. I was impartial—I hated them all. I destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. I suppressed all pilgrimages, emphatically including the sacred Hadj to Mecca and Medina. But I ruled through my Shi’ite followers, and they were biased. Christians and Jews suffered much worse than Moslems.
“What use was it to drive people of the Bible into apostasy, if all they did was convert to Islam? My solution was to create a new religion without priests and real estate and vested interests, so fanaticism could work for me, and Allah sent me proselytes to do the work. If we’d had more than four years… if we’d had eight, or twenty…”