Starfist FR - 03 - Recoil (12 page)

Behind Jimmy, slightly raised, as if on a pedestal, where all could see her, stood Sally Consolador, Jimmy’s “Consort in Christ,” arms raised to Heaven, cheeks stained with tears, shouting “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” her exclamations carefully synchronized with Jimmy’s preaching—a professionally choreographed performance. She swayed left as he swayed right, as though the two were the pendulums on heavenly metronomes. As she lifted up her voice, so did the tens of thousands gathered in the stadium until the joyous roar from the host of voices thundered through the air in an almost palpable wave of sound, but never overwhelming the powerfully amplified flow of words that issued wonderfully from Jimmy’s mouth. The cameras swept over the huge gathering in Hector Stadium on the outskirts of Fargo, near its spaceport. The stadium could seat one hundred thousand people, and that day, as every day so far that week, it was filled to capacity. Hundreds of people massed at the Anxious Bench as scores of others leaped into the aisles, blinded with tears of ecstasy, and staggered down to join them.

Jimmy was silent for a long moment, arms raised heavenward, eyes tightly closed, perspiration and tears streaming down his cheeks. Perfectly tuned now to his every mannerism, the crowd too fell immediately silent. It was as though he were the conductor and they the orchestra, so totally in control of this mass of humanity was Jimmy Jasper at that moment. When at last he spoke it was in a normal tone of voice: intimate, friendly, as if he were talking in private to every single person listening to his words. “My friends! Truly beloved! Satan is here, among us now, but he is powerless. He is thwarted, he is discomfited. By God, we have got him by the tail and we’re giving him the old heave-ho!” At this the thousands of listeners roared, “Praise the Lord! Victory to the Holy Spirit!”

Jimmy held up his hands for silence, which fell instantly upon the multitude. “I have been blessed. I have stood before our God as Moses stood before the Burning Bush, and my Lord God has told me to come down here and free His people from the grip of the Devil! I am God’s optician; I have come among you to grind you a new prescription! I am God’s surgeon; I have come among you to remove the cataracts from your eyes!

With me, you shall read God’s eye chart with the twentytwenty vision of the Holy Spirit!”

“Jesus!” Huygens Long whispered. “This guy’s as full of shit as—”

“Shhhh,” Chang-Sturdevant hissed.

“My friends!” Jimmy continued, “your president, your government, your military, they want you to believe that this Confederation is under attack from monsters, alien beings they call

‘Skinks.’ ” He pronounced the word as if it were wormwood on his tongue. “Where your government officials see these beings as only one-eyed jacks, I have seen the other side of those beautiful faces and I recognize them as Messengers of the Divine sent by our Creator to warn us away from the path of Satan and the eternal damnation to which it leads the unwary! We must convince our president and her ministers to abandon this unholy campaign against the angels of God and accept them as harbingers of the Millennium!”

“Okay, that’s it!” Attorney General Huygens Long exclaimed, half rising out of his chair. “He’s into politics now; revoke his goddamned tax-exempt status—”

“Hugh!” Chang-Sturdevant said sharply. “Sit down!”

“Dearly beloved!” Jimmy shouted, “before the fires of Hell descend upon mankind we must turn this world into a ‘burnedover district,’ a world burned over by the Holy Spirit! We must burn Satan out of our hearts and the hearts of those who govern us! I leave you with the words of the Apostles. First Peter, who in his Second Epistle General warned, ‘But there were

false prophets also among the people, even as there shall be false teachers among you, who privily shall bring in damnable heresies, even denying the Lord that brought them and bring upon themselves swift destruction.’ He is writing here of your government. And finally, John 6:37, ‘All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.’ Remember these words, my friends, and may the good Lord keep you and bless you until we meet again. Let us all join hands and pray.”

“Whew!” Chang-Sturdevant sighed as she winked out the vid screen. “If that’s how this guy comes across on a vid, what’s he like in person? I need a drink and a smoke. Come on, gentlemen, help yourselves.”

“Well, if you don’t mind me saying so, ma’am, what he needs is a great big enema!”

“You’re a hard case, AG.” The president laughed, pouring herself a generous dollop of Lagavulin. “But what do you know about this extraordinary man?”

Huygens Long, attorney general in Chang-Sturdevant’s government, glanced briefly at Marcus Berentus and General Cazombi before he answered. The adjective Chang-Sturdevant had used to describe a man he clearly believed was a charlatan made him nervous, not certain what words he should use. He had been observing the president closely, and the way she had reacted to Jasper’s preaching made him wonder. “Well, he’s from the world now calling itself Kingdom. He was formerly a prominent member of a Pentecostal sect known as the Rock of Ages True Light Primitive Christian Church based in a remote village known as Tabernacle. Sometime after the Skink invasion of Kingdom was defeated, he emerged in his present role as the founder of the Burning Flame Mission to Humanity. His ‘Consort in Christ’ ”—here the attorney general could not suppress an outright sneer—“Sally Consolador, is also from Kingdom, from a small town known as the Twelfth Station of Jerusalem. Before she joined up with Jasper she was a thoroughly respectable but harmless religious fanatic, just like Jasper himself.”

He shrugged. “The one thing they have in common is they were both abducted by Skinks.”

“Many of the Kingdomites were,” General Cazombi, Chairman of the Combined Chiefs, Confederation Armed Forces, interjected, “including one of our Marines even.”

“Oh, yes, one of Ted Sturgeon’s NCOs, if memory serves,”

Marcus Berentus, the minister of war volunteered. “But he wasn’t brainwashed like this Jasper fellow, was he?”

Chang-Sturdevant glanced up sharply at Berentus’s choice of words.

“No,” General Cazombi said, chuckling, “you can’t brainwash a Marine!”

“Hugh”—Chang-Sturdevant turned back to her AG—“what’s this Sally woman to Mr. Jasper?”

“Well, I don’t know. Jasper’s married, no children. His wife, Zamada, is back on Kingdom, presumably dusting off his Bible collection or whatever. I can find out how intimate Consolador and Jasper are, if you want me to.”

“No!” Chang-Sturdevant replied quickly, a bit too quickly, Huygens Long thought. “No. It’s one thing to research background on a religious figure but another to spy on him.”

“I wouldn’t call it ‘spying,’ ma’am,” Long replied. “After all, what this man is telling people to do amounts to treason. And I’m sure if I looked hard enough I’d find the dirt on this guy—”

“No, Hugh, that’s going too far. The public wouldn’t stand for such government probing. We guarantee freedom of speech and freedom of religion in this Confederation and I will not authorize any interference with those rights. Do you have any idea where he gets the money to hold these rallies, Hugh?”

Long shrugged. “Personal donations, ma’am. At today’s rally—he calls them Holiness Camps—he’ll take in maybe as many as a million credits. He’ll take in who knows how much after this broadcast is seen worldwide and the contributions flow in. We won’t know how much he makes off these camps until he files his personal income tax return, if he files one. But in the short time he’s been working on Earth he’s raised a lot, I

can tell you that.” As he spoke, Long speculated how he could put a spy into Jasper’s entourage, someone close enough to the preacher that he could find out just how much money he was taking in and from whom.

“This man has managed to tap into ordinary people’s lives, ma’am,” Berentus volunteered. “He’s giving them something they want. I don’t know how long the effect lasts when they get home or after the vid screen goes dead, but you saw how powerful his preaching is! And one more thing, he’s not alone. Others like him are preaching the same doctrine on several of our member worlds. They may not be quite as effective as he is but they are reading off the same sheet of music. Now, how could that be? Well, I’ll tell you. They all have one thing in common.”

Berentus paused. “They were all abducted by the Skinks. I have to agree with Hugh on this. Look at what he’s preaching. These people have been indoctrinated!”

“Ma’am, this has not yet spread to our military forces, but if it does”—General Cazombi shrugged—“our whole campaign against the Skinks could collapse. I can’t stop it if the troops pick this up. I don’t have the authority to dictate their religious convictions or to prevent them from practicing them. If this man’s preaching gets in the way of our mission, though, I’ll have to take action and it’ll get very messy. It’ll become a constitutional matter and wind up in the courts, and you all know what that’ll do to our readiness, to General Aguinaldo’s options as the anti-Skink task force commander. And we know what these things are. They’re not angels, they’re hostile aliens bent on the destruction of humanity. We’ve fought them, we know what they are.” Cazombi did not raise his voice but the way he spoke made it a major emotional outburst. Huygens Long nodded his head energetically at every word.

“Hmm,” Chang-Sturdevant replied. They were all silent for a moment, sipping their Scotch. “Well, gentlemen,” the president said at last, “I’ve done my homework too.” She nodded at her attorney general. “This Jasper is right out of the nineteenth century. Have any of you ever heard of the Reverend Charles Grandison Finney and the Great Revival? He was a charismatic Pentecostal preacher of the 1820s and 1830s in the old United States. Perhaps he was the greatest of the Pentecostals. The language Jasper uses, even the Bible quotations, are right out of Finney’s sermons. He even uses what he calls Cottage Prayer Meetings, where he meets with small groups in private and preaches to them, probably well-heeled individuals who give generously to his crusade. It’s uncanny if you know your history.”

“I’ve never heard of this Reverend Finney,” Marcus Berentus said quietly, “but I don’t need to hit the history books to remind you all that whatever this Finney was back in those days, he was no traitor.”

“It’s a bit early, isn’t it, Marcus, to be throwing that term about?” Chang-Sturdevant replied sharply. Huygens Long’s mouth dropped open. He cast a desperate glance at the other two men as if asking them to say something, but he knew Chang-Sturdevant well enough to know when not to argue with her. So did Berentus and Cazombi.

“Gentlemen, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do.” ChangSturdevant leaned forward and clasped her hands together.

“I’m going to meet this Jimmy Jasper,” she said, nodding her head with conviction, “have a personal interview with the man; not”—she grimaced slightly—“a ‘Cottage Prayer Meeting,’ but a tête-à-tête, to size him up myself.”

“What?” Huygens Long almost shouted, nearly dislocating his jaw.

“You heard me, Hugh. I’m going to invite him up here for lunch. I’ll have my minister of public affairs arrange it. Now, you gentlemen maintain low profiles but keep me informed. All right”—she glanced at her watch—“that’s it for now. Please excuse me.” Chang-Sturdevant got up abruptly and left the room, followed closely by her minister of war, who exchanged significant glances with the other two as he went out the door. Cazombi and Long sat rooted to their chairs, staring helplessly at the closed door. “Well,” Long said at last, “it could

well mean my ass as far as this government is concerned, but I am going to look into this guy and I am going to dig up the dirt on the bastard.”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Cazombi cautioned, “but if you’ve made up your mind, Hugh, well, keep me informed, would you?” He leaned over and tapped Long on his knee. “Keep her informed too, whatever the cost to your career. She’s not some ditzy broad, we both know that, and she’ll listen to facts and reason. We have got to do something about this character and the others, but we’ve got to go about it the right way. Do you agree?”

“Very well, Alistair. I won’t do anything until I’ve got all the facts together, and then I’ll present them to the president. Meanwhile, will you keep me informed on how this is impacting on our military forces?”

“I will.”

“And when the time comes to, er, put my neck in the noose, will you at least hold my hand?”

“You bet I will,” Cazombi replied, and they shook on it. Marcus Berentus had to hurry to catch up to Chang-Sturdevant as she walked rapidly down the corridor toward her office.

“Suelee,” he whispered, placing a hand gently on her shoulder. She shrugged it off angrily. “Suelee, don’t. Listen to me, will you?” This time she did not shake his hand off, but she whirled and faced him, her face flushed with anger. “For the love of God,” Berentus said, “do not meet with this man! I’m begging you. Don’t do it!”

“Marcus,” she answered in burning words, “if you persist in opposing me this way, then everything between us is over, do you understand me?”

Berentus stepped back as if shocked by an electric current.

“What?”

“You heard me. Now get out of my way.”

“Suelee—”

“I mean it, Marcus! Just why are you trying to tell me what’s good for me with this . . . this holy man?”

Berentus could not believe the conversation was really taking place. He swallowed hard and then his own face turned red with anger and he shouted so loudly that heads in adjoining offices turned toward the hallway.

“Because, love, this son of a bitch thinks he’s Jesus H. Fucking Christ!”

ELEVEN

Senator Maxim’s Villa on the Outskirts of Fargo, Earth She floated in a vast, warm bath. Someone was talking to her but she could not make out the words. The voice sounded like it was inside her head, she was sure of that. Maybe it wasn’t a voice, after all; maybe it was her own mind reciting a mantra, a low, monotonous chant over and over again. What difference did it make; it was soporific, comforting. She was vaguely aware of things attached all over her body—wires, cables, things like that—but no pain. No, far from it, she felt wonderful in the torpid liquid that surrounded her. She wasn’t breathing, she was sure of that. How, she wondered vaguely, could that be? Why worry? It was good not to breathe. But she did have a body, she could feel her fingers and toes, and, out of the corner of her eye, she sensed more than saw vague shapes moving somewhere outside the murky liquid bath, just shadows on her retinas, actually, not definable shapes, not shapes she recognized.