The calm face smiled. “You have been and will be born again and again, in the usual manner. Eventually you will be gathered with the rest, into the Tao. You may wish to think of it as into the loving arms of God.”
Marius Cook no longer felt the slightest apprehension. He was a warrior now—a soldier of God. He no longer even saw the vivid golden aura. This devil was damning himself with his answers. “And what have you got to say about false messiahs? False Christs?”
“The man Jesus has been quoted as saying, ‘By their fruits shall ye know them.’ ” Dove paused. “Marius, Marius, you are full of fear and hatred. You claim to love God, but no one truly loves God unless he loves his fellow humans—all of them, including those who hate and despise him, who persecute and kill him. If you loved me, you would not have brought me here chained.”
It seemed to Marius Cook that his prisoner had suddenly grown, a head taller. The apparency shook him, and he felt his fear as itself, not disguised now as anger or scorn. Meanwhile his prisoner spoke on.
“To love others, Marius, you must first love yourself. And to love yourself, it will help to examine yourself, as honestly as you can, without rationalizing, without excuses. And without withholding. The wrongs you’ve done, you cannot hide from the Tao.” The voice softened. “Yet the Tao loves you as it loves the most innocent child.
“Take responsibility for your acts, starting with what you did to the children Julia and Benjamin, and Millie-Rose.” Marius Cook’s eyes bulged in sudden shock. What? How could this be? “And to the wife of Harmon, and the wife of Bobby John . . .” The governer’s jaw fell slack. ” . . . And the widow Frankie Mae, who trusted you with her property . . .” Marius dropped into a crouch, an idiotic “wa wa wa” issuing from his mouth. Jerking his lower right-hand desk drawer entirely from the desk, he scrabbled within it, and came up with the Uzi. ” . . . and your old mentor and law partner Earl, when he began to be senile, and your . . .”
Rising, Marius fired a short burst into Dove’s midsection, the slugs erupting through the erect body, one striking a highway patrolman behind him. The officer fell, but Dove merely stopped listing the governor’s hidden sins.
“Ah, Bird,” he said. His voice was strong and clear, speaking the love name Cook’s mother had used. “You cannot kill the Tao’s love for you. It is impossible, however unworthy you think yourself.”
“Wa wa wa!” Cook’s finger convulsed, this time emptying the magazine in a long burst, the weapon climbing with recoil, stitching Dove from belly to forehead, blood gushing from a torn throat. Fragments of skull and brain splattered behind him, and plaster fell from the wall. Most in the room had dropped to the floor, even Everett Miller, who hadn’t known his old friend as well as he’d thought.
Everyone dropped in fact but Dove and the governor. And those behind the cameras, who transmitted it all and got it on cube, though they wouldn’t remember doing it.
For a long moment Dove remained upright, his smile and aura bright almost beyond bearing. With a nasal cry, Marius Cook threw the empty Uzi at him, the weapon striking him in the chest. Dove began to slump, folding at knees and hips, falling forward to the blood-pooled floor. The governor screamed, opened an upper drawer, this time bringing forth a .38-caliber pistol, shoving its barrel into his own mouth so hurriedly he broke teeth with it, as if he couldn’t do it fast enough. And pulled the trigger.
The cameramen got that, too.
67
Aftershocks
At the equipment yard, the crowd outside the fence had grown slowly at first, then after one o’clock more rapidly, despite the baking sun. As always, some were ill or crippled: arthritis, cancer, emphysema, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis . . . The healers with the bus left none of them unhealed, while Jenny Buckels’ father and brother watched from the shade of a dump truck.