Still, she decided, these past weeks had been among the happiest of her entire life. The divine will had worked itself out, and humanity at last was given a great gift. It was no longer tied to the machine, but it also no longer would ever truly want. As simple communal peasants, guided by a common faith and culture, protected from the corruption outside and unencumbered by the burden of knowing their own past and origins, they could truly cleanse their spirits and purify their souls. Now they were free to attain inner perfection, without fear, without want, without jealousy or hatred or the legacies of their ancestors. It was enough.
She went down to the inner temple to give thanks and to pray and finally cleanse her own soul. She opened the double doors and entered and saw that four priestesses in the robes of temple administration were kneeling in the front row. It made her feel very joyous, and she went forward to the altar, passing them, and knelt at it, the statues of the angels looking down at her from both sides.
After a while she rose and turned to go, then stopped, absolutely dumbstruck. The four “priestesses” were now revealed as four fairly large men, two now guarding the entrance with submachine guns while the other two faced her grimly with two identical weapons.
She recognized the nearer pair. “Mustafa! Kamal! You must not be in here! You should not be in Anchor at all! It is sacrilege!” They were two of Ngomo’s officers who’d been at the presumed “test” at X-ray.
“This is in the name of Allah, Daughter of Satan,” said Kamal, his voice shaking with emotion. “And for our wives and children and faithful comrades whom your devil’s scheme has enslaved.”
Before members of the temple wardens assisted by two Anchor Guard soldiers who happened to be nearby could cut them all down, they had pumped sixty-one bullets into her frail body.
Suzuki rushed to the temple as soon as she heard, and all the priestesses backed off from her and let her through. She stared hard at the crumpled body, like some discarded rag doll, for a very long time. Suddenly, her mind cleared, and she knew exactly what she had to do.
“Find diggers and masons. The square in front of this temple is to be excavated and crypts placed there before it is replanted. Take her body down to the medical section and clean and preserve it until that is done. We will lay her in it, with full honor, and pray to her memory.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother,” responded one of the high-ranking administrative priestesses.
“Patch the holes and repair the damage, but do not ever touch the bloodstains on the altar or the statues. Encase the blood-spattered altar cloth so that it is preserved. From this point, all novices will give of their blood at their altars as a sacrament of ordination, and those there will drink of it, so that we may never forget her or her sacrifice and never again drop our guard against the forces of evil that would pull this holy church down.”
“It will be done, Reverend Mother.”
“This place is particularly consecrated by her blood. It shall henceforth be known as Holy Anchor and will be the seat of the Holy Mother Church. This day will forever after be known as Martyr’s Day, and shall be a day of prayer and fasting and soul-cleansing. We will notify each Sister General to make an individual pilgrimage here, to witness and to shed her own blood in commitment.”
She turned, kneeled, and dipped a finger into Watanabe’s blood, then got back up and faced them. “Do you accept me as the truly anointed successor to the saint slain here today?”
They were shocked by the actions and in no mood to think things through. They took, as she expected they would, the path of least resistance.
Suzuki held up the bloody finger. “This is her blood.” She put it into her mouth and licked it clean. It tasted lousy. Forty-year-old drama classes were coming back as if they were yesterday. “It is now in me. By that authority and action shall this mantle pass from leader to leader. Her blood shall continue and link together this responsibility. Do you accept my leadership?”
No one spoke.
“You here will be the body of the church. I will be its head. We will have a sacred rite of coronation following thirty days of mourning. I would like to see everyone in charge of temple departments in the big office upstairs in one hour. Before anyone arrives, I want all Sisters not engaged on anything vital to begin work on sealing off the power plate in the temple sub-basement. It is a way for evil to enter. Wall it off and fill it with concrete. Is the chief temple Warden present?”
“Yes, Reverend Mother.”
“Effective now, all entrances to the temple will be staffed at all times. Anyone, regardless of rank or position, will be required to completely disrobe so that no such sacrilege as this might ever occur again. Any lay women entering, no matter how young, will be required to disrobe and be given a special temple robe. Effective immediately, no undergarments or jewelry of any kind will be worn within the temple. The robe and sandals will be the only things accepted by me, with the sole exception of the ring we all wear to wed us to the church. Understand?”
“Yes, Reverend Mother.” There would be no more weapons of any sort brought in this building. Suzuki was not about to be found someday with bullets in her, nor strangled or anything else.
Except for sealing the transmission plates, much of this would be optional with the Sister General in each Anchor, but she would get to an entire regimen for all priestesses in good time. It would be a fascinating lifelong new experiment in mass psychology and sociology. Because she had great power herself, she would ensure, somehow, that all Sister Generals knew who to obey and what to do and not do. She’d work out a way to manage it. She hadn’t asked for this, and had tried to avoid it, but here it was. What the hell. She had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do.
O.K., Ryan, you got yourself a deal, she thought, not without some excitement.
Brenda Coydt returned to Ryan’s field headquarters because she had no place else to go, only to discover that he was too busy to see her. She had remained, persistent and getting in the way, until he finally had to talk with her.
He looked tired, but otherwise much the same. “Brenda, what in hell are you doing here?” he asked her.
“I’m the only remaining member of the general staff other than yourself, but I don’t seem to have a command anymore.”
“I’ve got my own security force, Branda. You’re out of your element here.”
“I’ve got considerable sensitivity power. I can be a big help, Mike.”
He sighed. “I don’t have time to be polite or go over old times. There’s just too damned much I have to do to save lives here. Brenda, you don’t fit in here for several reasons, and I’m going to be blunt. First, as I said, your skills were killed with the old order. Second, you blew it. You let Ngomo’s plot go on. You saved Watanabe and used her and came up with some of this scheme and now that it’s backfired on you you figure, O.K., so I killed a lot of people for nothing and sent maybe eight million people back to the Stone Age worshipping planets and destroyed the lives and cultures of even more. So I let a fellow officer murder my commander. So what? Now it’s time for another job. Well, bullshit, Brenda. It’s not what you could do for me, Brenda, it’s what you’d almost certainly wind up doing to me, and you couldn’t handle this bunch. I never asked for this, but I got it and I sure as hell ain’t gonna give it to you.”
She was genuinely stung and surprised by this attitude. “Mike, I—”
“Can the crap and the excuses; I don’t have the time,” he snapped, cutting her off. “You know what you are, Brenda? I don’t think you do, and I’m not sure you ever will, but I’ll tell you anyway. You’re a professional psychopath. Oh, your kind’s been around since somebody formed tribes, and every time we don’t deal with your type because you’re useful. You sleep sound at night with a clear conscience no matter what. You can order the execution of five hundred innocent people and witness the event if you can see a military objective to doing it, but it doesn’t bother you as long as that objective’s there. Nobody’s a real person but you. Everybody’s just some kind of playing piece on a huge chessboard filled with little miniature soldiers and civilians, and you’re the kid playing with the toys.”
“You didn’t think of me that way when I was useful to you.”
“Sure I did. Everybody did. Everybody always has. But you were useful. You enjoyed wallowing in the slime and muck of other people’s lives and secrets, and you would do or order all those distasteful and evil things we wanted to do but couldn’t ourselves. Better for your sort to serve those with some conscience than those with none, but it’s only as long as you serve. When you start knocking off the boss and trying to take control, you’re nothing but another Watanabe, mad as hell and a danger to everyone.”
“If you feel this way, why not have me executed, then?”
“Because you’re no worse than many around here, for one thing. Because you screwed up so badly that you no longer have a power base. You want an assignment? Use that power of yours. Go out and carve a big pocket and tailor it to your own likes, then try to see if you can talk anybody into moving in there. Only watch your back.”
She was feeling angry now. “I’m no common girl you can just push around and cast off! I still have influence and followers around. You may regret this.”
“Love, you got nobody. Let me tell you this before I order you out of here for good—and don’t try to get back in. Folks here have power, too, and they’ll cut you into little pieces. You better get a head start, woman. Your old exec, Singh, turned down a job in my command. He’s got a band of men and women who all want to find you. They don’t have much in common except varying degrees of sensitivity—Moslems, Hindus, Catholics, Baptists, maybe a few Buddhists and Jews and God knows what else—but they all hate your living guts. All of ’em lost something when your little scheme got played out. Some lost family, some lost friends, they all lost their religious base and their cultural heritages, but Singh’s the worst. You stole his ideals and his dreams. They’re all good people, but they won’t be good for nothing until they find you.”
That hit home. Enemies out for revenge she understood completely, although Singh’s participation particularly hurt her. She had always felt that they were two of a kind.
“Mike—if that’s true, you can’t send me out there and I can’t build a pocket! You know that! You at least owe me some protection.”
He thought a moment. “There’s only one place you’d ever be safe, Brenda, and that’s in Anchor. I’ll guarantee secure and safe escort to the Anchor of your choice. Best I’ll offer. Get there, get rid of that uniform, maybe change your looks a little first, and go. A bunch of Ngomo’s officers blew Watanabe away over at Headquarters Anchor and your old pal Suzuki’s taken over the church. She might have a job for you. Either that or use that power to totally change yourself. You can’t change the way you are, but you can sure as hell change everything else. Make yourself look so different, nobody will ever be sure it’s you.”
She sighed. “Well. I guess that’s it, then.”
He shrugged. “Yeah, that’s it. Get lost. Brenda. You’re scaring the troops.” And, with that, he stalked off.