An Image of God

Author: Athrelon

Original post: https://podnplanetentry.wordpress.com/2014/12/03/an-image-of-god/

Entry for the YC116 Pod and Planet Fiction Contest in the Eight Thousand Suns in New Eden category.

I had studied at the seminary for over three years before Zanath allowed me to deliver the weekly homily. There was a small congregation that week, for the winter was cold and the first word of the riots had reached us.

I’d stood on the dais before when cleaning the chapel, that morning, looking out at the low, cavernous space, and feeling the eyes of the entire congregation on me, my feet felt the slightest premonition of a tremor. But I silenced these thoughts, stared at my notes, and began.

“Our theme today is the contact between the Faith and the World. It is,” I grinned, “a lot to cover. But it’s all the more significant given recent events.

“How should a man of the Faith conduct his life in the world? Elders of the Faith have given many interpretations of this doctrine. Some say that we should confront the world like a soldier, treating everything outside our church as enemy territory. Others say that our faith should be a private matter, and not affect the rest of my life. The Amarr have their own doctrine, one that slavishly gives divine blessing to whatever the Emperor does.

“But we are Matari! And our forefathers’ exodus from slavery is no less an act of divine intervention than the first inspiration of the scriptures on the shores of Amarr Prime!” Murmurs of approval filled the crowd.

“We are blessed to live in less turbulent times. But it is nonetheless our sacred duty to build upon this legacy. So we must continue to spread the holy word through our communities. We must lead our public lives with such righteousness that even unbelievers cannot help but be moved.

“Now, we live in Gallente space and it is not always politic to speak of God. They remind us – us! The sons of slaves! – that men have done evil in the name of God. But I think that to heed that counsel, and treat our faith as something to be hidden away like a collection of art, would be cowardice bordering on apostasy.

“That men sin is no surprise to any of us. So neither should it be a surprise that men have sinned in the name of God. Yet we are called out to reach out despite our imperfections, just as we are called to the holy despite our sinful natures. So we must go out and spread the holy word more families and our neighbors. For those of us of age we must enter the realms of politics, that are leaders may be guided by the goodness of God. For what God demands of each of us is not only to live lives of virtue, but in so doing to leave an image, however small, however fleeting, of God upon the world.”

I sat down in my seat on the dais, adjusting my formal robe so that it would hang properly. As Zanath led us in a moment of silent prayer, I couldn’t help looking around at the congregants, looking to see if I had left any impression on them. Maybe a hundred faces, mostly Matari, with a few Gallente sprinkled across the back rows. If I could light a fire in their hearts, just imagine what we could accomplish. Behind them, the space of the temple stretched onwards, broad and ponderous where Amarrian temples were tall and ornamental. It was a space that cried out to be filled, filled by throngs of congregants and icons of dedication to God. Zanath called us to announce the next hymn, and I stood to lead the singing. The service was long, for the liturgy was thousands of years old, and not one detail could be omitted.

Some time later, I was taking my supper in the refectory when Zanath sat down to join me, eyes twinkling under his grey hood, and extended a hand.

“Congratulations on your first homily,” he said. I smiled and shook his outstretched hand, but said nothing. “I had no idea that you were such a firebrand,” he added.

In all the years I’d studied under him, I never heard Zanath contradict or criticize anyone. But as a teacher and in debate, he had a way of saying the perfectly obvious in a way that would tear through all our logical defenses, leaving us scrambling for balance. “I was doing nothing of the sort,” I said hotly, “just teaching the Scriptures as I see them.”

“You are doing a great deal more than that,” he said with a smile, “it almost sounded like you were breaching the iron wall between church and –“

“Oh come off it Father. That so-called doctrine is nothing but an invention of the Ultra-Nationalists trying to keep us out of power.”

“Believe it or not, I see the hand of God in that doctrine,” he said quietly. “Not to protect the U-Nats from us, but to protect us from ourselves.”

He looked out at the refectory. Like the chapel, it had been blasted out of the sheer rock face of the mountains decades ago, when the town was nothing but a remote mining outpost. A few groups of monks and students sat in clusters along the long tables, dwarfed by the expanse of the chamber. Zanath smiled and turned back to me. “My study of the faith has shown that every time we have a little success, draw a little closer to God, we become foolish and vulnerable, deluded by dreams of empire. You saw the hand of God in our uprising, and I agree. But I also see it at Vak’Atioth, when the proudest ambitions of the Reclaiming were extinguished. It is precisely when we most feel the urge to do something that we must resist that temptation.”

“How can you say that? I came to study here, from another continent, because it was the beating heart of our faith, the only place for a free Matari to learn about the Faith. You did that, you created this place. Are you going to tell me that that was also overweening ambition?”

“You exaggerate my importance,” he smiled gently. Then he became suddenly serious, “To tell it true, I have often thought, of late, that this place was a mistake.”

“What? You’d have us go to the Ammatar? Kneel before the Amarr slavemasters?”

He shook his head tiredly, looking older than I’d ever seen him. “As a young man, I wanted to create something. A real community for the diaspora that still held to the Faith. To leave a faint image of God in the world, as you put it.” His eyes roamed around the cavenerous refectory. “For a time, a brief time, this place was the spiritual center of the Minmatar diaspora. And then – ”

“And then the rebellion happened.”

“And then the rebellion happened. And our people left to repopulate the homeworlds, and left the Faith to resurrect some simulacrum of the old ways. We became…impolitic.”

“Yet here we are in Gallente space, free to preach and to proselytize. We’re free from both enslavement and tribal paganism. A generation ago this planet was an backwater, think of what we could do a generation from now. Doesn’t that excite you?”

He turned to me, his eyes hard. “We are not free, and we never will be in this lifetime. So the Scriptures tell us, and so our lives affirm. Haven’t you heard about the sacking of the church in Santomme?” He referred, of course, to the anti-Minmatar riots, which had started shortly after we had executed Broteau for the assassination of Karin Midular. Most recently there had been a riot in the spaceport city of Santomme. I had grown up a few hundred miles from there, and the planetary news feeds were in an uproar. Even here it had thrown a pall over our town, with people speaking in whispers, going outside only in groups.

“Well yes, what with the Midular incident, we Matari aren’t exactly popular these days with the rabble, but nobody respectable gets behind that sort of nonsense –”

“It’s not as Matari that we should be worried. Why do you think the mob sacked the church specifically? It’s because they knew the police would do nothing. Because our very existence is, as you put it, impolitic. I’ve been in communication with priests on a dozen worlds. Everywhere the story is the same. The police stand guard at Gallente stores, but when the mob turns to attack a church, the police are nowhere to be found.

“You grew up in the Republic, to you this is home. And yes, as Matari we are allies. But as adherents of the Faith…or as they would see it, the Amarr faith…we are a problem. We give the lie to the idea that blood is all that matters, that religion is a matter of fashion like the hemlines of dresses on Caille. And that makes our hosts…uncomfortable. And the more we agitate, the harder they will crack down.”

He looked at me seriously. “You are the most talented student that I’ve ever trained, you have ambition to match. Do not be so careless in using that talent. You dream of conquest, spreading the Faith to all the Republic. But ours is no longer an age for such heroics. I fear that our age is to be a cold winter, one that will test our faith until only the purest survive.”

“And what would you have me do in such an age?” I asked.

He took my hand in his and looked at me with a ferocity I had never seen in him before. “Guard my flock,” he said. Then he was gone, his robe with flowing behind him as he strode out through the refectory to the blowing snow outside.

It was in a dream that I first heard them. I was walking outside our courtyard in a raging snowstorm, staring upwards at the mountain face of our seminary, and over the howling wind I thought I heard the distant chanting of a thousand seraphim. I could pick out an occasional fragment of ancient Amarrian but the voices danced maddeningly just beyond my comprehension. There was the sound of distant drums and I felt a bitterly cold wind sweep across my face, blowing harder and harder as though to scour my soul clean. Just my thought I could bear it no longer, I woke up with a start. My window and blown open halfway in the evening gale and bits of snow scatter themselves across the floor of myself.

With a groan, I got up to close the window and then stopped as I heard the chanting continued. It was coming from outside. I peered out and saw men filling the streets, hundreds strong. A few dozen men, clad in black, carrying ice picks and shovels, the rest of the crowd milling behind. The streets were lit by two burning storefronts, showing the broken windows and looted storefronts of the main streets. The crowd was in an uproar, shouting encouragement as one of the men was shattering a store window with his pickaxe. I heard a woman squeal as she clutched a mink overcoat freshly pulled from a tailor’s shop. Presently I heard a ragged chant from the crowd that slowly swelled to coherence like the focusing of a telescope: “God-lovers! God-lovers! God-lovers!” After another moment it faded back to incoherent shears, and after the splintering of another glass window.

I hooded myself and ran down the hallway until I reached the hall of pillars that looked out high above our courtyard. From here, anyone looking up would barely be able to see me silhouetted against the top windows of the chapel. And I saw now that the crowd was gathering, slowly drifting towards our courtyard and our main gate. Tentatively at first, they picked up speed, almost to a jog, then stopped short. Looking down, I saw the reason why: the gates had opened, and Father Zanath was walking out, towards the crowd, wearing none of his formal finery, but only a simple grey robe. I wanted to scream at him to get back inside, but as I looked on, the crowd slowed and actually began to fall back as he advanced. He raised his hand as though delivering a blessing and spoke in a high clear voice: “Brothers, what is this madness?” And something about the way he held himself shone through, even to this mob, so that the mood deflated. In the silence that followed I could see some of the crowd skulking off, some standing fast, heads bowed with shame. After a pregnant pause Zanath spoke again “Let us have no more of this wickedness. Go forth and sin no more, or else come join me in prayer.” And they did.

I saw him before anyone else did – a burly ethnic Gallente ringleaders of the looting mob. Standing near the back of the crowd, he and his companions had been looking around nervously as the crowd quieted. Now he strode forward with the pace of a man who has made up his mind, making straight for Zanath with his ice pick raised over his head. I screamed, “Look out!” and began hurtling down the many steps to the gate. But not before seeing, from the corner of my, the edge of the pick impact Zanath’s bare head.

There are stories of ancient prophets who were afflicted with a holy madness, who abandoned their lives and walked into the deserts of Amarr, alone. Some returned gibbering mad; a very few returned inspired with new divine revelations. But what they all had in common was that they never remembered their time in the desert. I, too, never remembered my headlong flight down the stairs, or forcing the gates open and confronting the mob. But when I was myself again, I was in the grand atrium, the gates were slammed shut, and Zanath’s blood was soaking my rough sleeping robe. Someone began to chant an ancient requiem, and voices joined in, punctuated by stifled sobs. I looked up and saw my brothers there, gathered in a semicircle around me. I stayed silent, cradling the body in my lap. I did not regain my powers of speech for some time.

It wasn’t until after the rite, when we had all fallen silent, that I could hear the distant sound of the mob outside. They had clearly retreated for a while, but I could hear, just over the howling of the wind, the distant report of blaster fire. Sliding out from under Zanath’s body, I stood. As though animated by a common spirit, we carried his body to the floor of the chapel. It was not a dignified resting place, but it seemed a fitting one, at least for tonight. I turned to my brothers, the monks and scholars I had spent the last three years of my life with. Under the bitter cold in my arms and legs, I could feel the deeper bite of fear. I forced myself to stillness, and spoke.

“Who hear knows how to use a rifle?” Five hands went up. “All right, we’ll go to the storerooms and see what we can find there. The rest of you, barricade the gate and patrol the perimeter. But first, come, let us pray.”

Afterwards, we split up without much talk. We did find some old plasma rifles that had been donated decades ago, lost in the pile of medical supplies and industrial drones that the church had collected over decades. If we are to die tonight, I thought mordantly, it will not be for want of ammunition. Thus equipped, we made our way up to the ledge, the spot where I’d stood before all this happened, before Zanath had been taken from us.

I looked out at the gathering crowd streaming into the courtyard, trying very hard not to look at the dark brown stain just outside the gates. Perhaps in the days to come will build a monument there. Perhaps in the days to come we would be on another world. “Guard my flock,” Zanath had said. Despite all this, the Faith would live on.

“All right brothers,” I said, trying not to let my voice shake. “Let’s do this –”