The Jesus Incident

Chapter Sixty-Three

Why shouldst Thou cause a man to put himself to shame by begging aid, when it is in Thy power, O Lord, to vouchsafe him his necessities in an honorable fashion?
- A Kahan, Atereth ha-Zaddikim, Shiprecords
HALI KEPT a careful watch on Waela as the E-clone assistants prepared an obstetrics area within their temporary medical shelter. The cliff shadow covered them, and the confusion of the army departing filled the air with discordant noise: shouts, grunts, the crunching of the cutter's wheels on the sand. She felt a sense of relief as the demons moved off with Panille. He frightened her now. Her soft-voiced poet friend had become the keeper of a terrifying inner fire. He was keeper of the kind of terrible power she had seen at Golgotha.
Heavy as she was with the unborn child, Waela moved with a supple quickness. She was in her natural habitat: Pandora. This place had changed Waela, too. Was that why Panille had mated with her? Hali put down an anguished stab of jealousy.
I am a med-tech. I am a Natali! An unborn child needs me. I want joy!
She tried not to think about what might happen out there on the plain. Thomas had warned her what to expect. Where had he learned about battle? She had been unable to suppress feelings of outrage.
"Those people who will die, how are they different from us?"
She had hurled the question at him as they moved down from the clifftop, steadied by hylighter tendrils, the red streaks of dayside fingering a gray horizon on their right. It had been a nightmare setting: the babble of the army, the muted flutings of hylighters. The great orange bags had floated some people down to the plain, carried equipment, guarded the descent of those who stayed afoot.
Hundreds of people, tons of equipment.
Thomas had not answered her question until she repeated it.
"We have to take over the Redoubt. Ship will destroy us if we don't."
"That makes us no better than them."
"But we will survive."
"Survive as what? Does Ship say anything about that?"
"Ship says, 'When you shall hear of wars and the rumors of wars, be you not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet.'"
"That's not Ship! That's the Christian Book of the Dead!"
"But Ship quotes it."
Thomas had looked at her then and she had seen the pain within his eyes. Christian Book of the Dead.
Ship had shown parts of it to her on request, displaying the words within the tiny cubby where Panille once had studied. If Thomas really were a Ceepee, he would know those words. She wondered if Oakes knew them. How strange that no one shipside had responded to her careful questions and probes about the events on the Hill of Skulls.
Thomas had frightened her then as they paused to regain their breath on a little rock platform deep in a fissure.
"Why did Ship show you the crucifixion? Have you ever asked yourself that, Hali Ekel?"
"How do yo.... how do you know abou.... ?"
"Ship tells me things."
"Did Ship tell you wh.... . ?"
"No!"
Thomas set off down the steep trail. She called after him: "Do you know why Ship showed me that?"
He stopped at a gap in the fissure, looked out at the morning light growing on the plain, the glistening brilliance of reflections off the Redoubt's plaz in the distance. She caught up with him.
"Do you know?"
Thomas rounded on her, the pain terrible in his eyes. "If I knew that, I'd know how to WorShip. Did Ship give you no clues?"
"Only that we must learn about holy violence."
He glared at her. "Tell me what you saw there at the crucifixion!"
"I saw a man tortured and killed. It was brutal and awful, but Ship would not let me interfere."
"Holy violence," Thomas muttered.
"The man they killed, he spoke to me. H.... I thought he recognized me. He knew I had come far to see him there. He said I was not hidden from him. He said I should let them know it was done."
"He said what?"
"He said if anyone understood God's will, then I must understand i.... but I don't!" She shook her head, tears close. "I'm just a med-tech, a Natali, and I don't know why Ship showed me that!"
Thomas spoke in a whisper: "That's all the man said?"
"N.... he told the people in the crowd not to weep for him but for their children. And he said something about a green tree."
"If they do these things in a green tree, what will they do in a dry?" Thomas intoned.
"That's it! That's what he said! What did he mean?"
"He mean.... he meant that the powerful grow more deadly in times of adversity - and what they do in the roots can be felt to the ends of the branches - forever."
"Then why have you created this army? Why are you going out there t.... ?"
"Because I must."
Thomas resumed his way down the trail, refusing to respond to her. Others who had chosen to climb down caught up, pressed close. She had no other opportunity to speak to him. They were at the foot of the cliffs soon and she had her own duties while Thomas set off about his war.
Ferry was one of the people Thomas assigned to medical work. She knew what Thomas and Kerro thought about the old man and this prompted her now to kindness toward him. While she worked with Ferry in the rude fabric shelter below the cliffs, she heard Thomas speaking to his army.
"Blessed by Ship, my strength, which teaches my hands to war and my fingers to fight."
Was that any way for a Ceepee to talk? She asked this of Ferry while they worked.
"That's the way Oakes talks." The old man seemed resigned to his fate but eager to help her.
The army was busy at its preparations then, Panille standing nearby like a cold observer. She did not like the nearness of the demons, but he said they would not harm the people here. He said the hylighters had filled the demons' senses with a false world which kept them in check.
Ferry shambled past her then, glancing oddly at her nose ring.
She wondered how Ferry felt about the way Thomas talked. Thomas spoke about the old man in front of him as though Ferry were not there.
"This old fool doesn't have any real power," Thomas had said. "Oakes thinks he has a corner on the real power and the symbolic power, right here on Black Dragon. He doesn't share power. He's set himself up here for easy pickings compared to what we'd have encountered at Colony."
"I told him he was moving too soon," Ferry had said.
Thomas had ignored him, addressed Panille. "Ferry's a liar, but we can use him. He must know something valuable about Oakes' plans."
"But I don't know anything." The old man's voice quavered.
One of the Naturals Thomas had named as an aide had come up then with organizational problems. Thomas had stared at the hashmarks over the man's right eye. They had gone away together, Thomas muttering: "Helluva way to slap together an army, out of somebody else's rejects."
She had seen some sense in his orders, though, the E-clones grouped according to design: runners, carriers, lifter.... He had taken a training inventory - equipment operator, light-physics technician, welder, unskilled labo....
She thought about this as she prepared the medical facilities under the cliff. What difference did it make to her how Thomas organized his force? When they arrived here, they would merely be wounded.
Waela, helping with the preparations for the delivery, stopped in front of Hali. "Why do you look so worried? Is it something about my baby?"
"No, nothing like that."
And Waela heard her old inner voice, Honesty, marking time: The baby will be born soon. Soon.
Waela stared at Hali.
"What has you so worried?"
Hali looked at Waela's mounded abdomen. "If the hylighters hadn't brought us that supply of burst from Colon...."
"Colony didn't need it anymore. They're all dead."
"That's not wha.... ."
"You're afraid my baby would've been robbing you of your years, your life an...."
"I don't think your baby would take from me."
"Then what is it?"
"Waela, what are we doing here?"
"Trying to survive."
"You sound like Thomas."
"Thomas makes a great deal of sense sometimes."
Three E-clones intruded, staggering into the shelter, two of them helping a third who had lost an arm. All of them had been burned. One held the severed arm against the stump, bloody sand all around the wound.
"Who's the med-tech here?" one of them demanded. He was a dwarf with long, flexible fingers.
Ferry started to step forward, but Hali motioned him back. "Stay with Waela. Let me know when she needs me."
"I'm a doctor, you know." There was hurt in the old voice.
"I know. Stay with Waela."
Hali led the injured trio to the emergency alcove partly sheltered by the black rocks of the cliff. She worked quickly, closing up the severed stump with celltape after powdering it with septalc.
"Can't you save his arm?" the dwarf demanded.
"No. What's happening out there?"
The dwarf spat on the floor. "Hell and damn folly."
She finished with his companions, looked at the dwarf. His comment surprised her and he saw it. "Oh, we can think well enough," he said.
"Come here and let me tend to you," she said. His right arm was badly burned. She spoke to distract him from his pain. "How did you come to be with the hylighters?"
"Lewis pushed us out. Like garbage. You know what that means. There were Runners. Most of us didn't get away. I hope the Runners get in there." He gestured with his good arm at the Redoubt across the plain. "Eat every one of those shiptit bastards!"
The dwarf slid off the treatment table as she finished. He headed toward the exit.
"Where are you going?"
"Back to help where I can." He stood with the fabric flap held back and she stared out the opening at the Redoubt. Blue flashes filled the air there. She could hear distant shouts and screams.
"You're in no condition t...."
"I'm well enough to carry the wounded."
"There are more?"
"Lots of 'em." He lurched out the opening, the fabric falling closed behind him.
Hali closed her eyes. In her mind she could see a mill of people. It changed to a crowd and the crowd became a mob. Foul-breath and the salty stink of blood were on the wind. The tiny lips of cuts and the great smears of burn wounds filled her imagination. A pair of broken knees blurred through her memory - the men on the crosses.
"That's not the way," she muttered. She took up her pribox and an emergency medical kit, stepped to the opening, flung it back. The dwarf already was a small figure in the distance. She strode after him.
"Where are you going?" It was Ferry's voice calling after her.
She did not turn. "They need me out there."
"But what about Waela?"
"You're a doctor." She shouted it without taking her gaze off the smoke billowing in the distance.