Starfist FR - 03 - Recoil (2 page)

“Accident at the mine!” Zamada said, half rising out of her chair.

Jimmy paused, head canted toward the mines, as if anticipating another blast. A long, loud, screeching roar filled the air all about them and through the window the pair saw a brilliant flash of light. “No, I don’t think so,” Jimmy said calmly, reflectively. He stood as if in slow motion. The spoon in his hand clattered on the table unnoticed. An eerie calm seemed to have come over him. “Is it—?” he whispered. Then, “Stay here,” he ordered Zamada, and in two long strides was out the door. Jimmy caught his breath at what he saw outside. The sky was filled with tongues of fire almost too bright to bear looking at directly. Waves of tremendous concussive sound washed over Jimmy Jasper like a stiff breeze, ruffling his clothing, raising the dust in the street. His neighbors stood outside their houses, faces turned toward the heavens, eyes transfixed on the mighty display overhead. Someone began to wail in terror and immediately others began moaning and screaming and calling upon God to protect them. But not Jimmy Jasper. He, of all the assembled, knew positively and without question what was happening. That knowledge surged through him and suffused his spirit with the joy of heavenly rapture. He fell to his knees, his face filled with happiness, tears of glory streaming down his cheeks and arms uplifted to the sky, and he shouted in his powerful, commanding voice, “Hallelujah! Dear Father, it is the Sign! It is the Sign!

Lord God Almighty, thank You! Thou hast given us the Sign!”

The Tabernacle Rock of Ages True Light Christian Church, established two centuries before in a remote mountainous region on Kingdom, had never boasted a very large congregation, but the faithful had been true to their Pentecostal roots through all those long years. Tabernacle itself began as a riproaring, everything-goes mining camp called Hard Times. It had grown to a town of about ten thousand inhabitants by the time Jimmy Jasper was born some forty years before the Sign. The name of the town had been changed to Tabernacle by Jimmy’s great-grandfather when the members of the Rock of Ages sect came to outnumber the miners. In time, those workers who did not convert moved elsewhere.

The miners moved not because the Rock of Ages congregation persecuted them. No, they moved on because the handclapping, singing, shouting, weeping congregants, speaking in tongues and rolling in the dust in an ecstasy of religious fervor, were really hard to take, especially on Saturday nights when a hardworking guy only wanted to go out and tie one on. First the whores moved on, those that didn’t convert; then the publicans; then the shops stopped selling thule and tobacco, and before you knew it, a working stiff couldn’t even pee in the street after dark without a bunch of the Jesus freaks confronting him, singing, praying, begging him to convert, the Holy Spirit virtually oozing from every pore. No, those old boys moved because the Rock of Ages people were, for the ordinary, fun-loving workingman, one colossal pain in the ass. So Jimmy grew up (Praise the Lord! as he often put it) surrounded by the loving, caring, righteous fold of his ancestors’

church. Long before his time the mines had come into the possession of the Rock of Ages Church, which ran them with the same rigorous enthusiasm with which its adherents read their Bibles. Jimmy worked in the mines as a young man. The labor was hard and the work made him hard, physically and mentally, and it was good because it was dangerous and made him fear his God. He joyfully joined his companions far beneath the earth, singing an old miner’s song (lyrics suitably sanitized!) as they worked:

An angel with his glimmering light Guides us down into the night. Some dig for silver, some dig for gold As we lift our praise to the God of old!

By the time Jimmy reached his twenties he discovered that he had a voice for preaching—and could he preach! His voice was so powerful with the spirit of the Lord that it rang through the chapel during services and tickled the innards of the worshippers. His preaching particularly affected the women. Jimmy Jasper was tall and handsome, broad-shouldered with an unruly mop of auburn hair and piercing blue eyes that transfixed his listeners as he preached. Sometimes women fainted, especially when he preached on a text from the Old Testament, and at such times he appeared to them as Moses himself come out of the desert or Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac or even Noah, herding them into the Ark of Paradise!

So by the time he was forty, Jimmy Jasper was a prominent member of the Rock of Ages True Light Christian Church. “In my name is Prophecy!” he often thundered to rapt congregations, quoting from the Book of Revelation, 21:11, “ ‘Having the glory of God: and her light was like unto a stone most precious, even like a jasper stone, clear as crystal.’ My message to you, dearly beloved, is clear as crystal: Repent or be damned!”

The Rock of Ages sect consisted of four-and-twenty separate congregations meeting individually in homes and common buildings around Tabernacle. The sect did not approve of formal church buildings but, like the Christians of old, preferred to meet wherever the faithful gathered. Huge cathedrals were a worldly abomination and a perversion of the Word to them. So the members were free to worship wherever they wanted. They propagated their faith among themselves with prayer chains, worship services, family prayer, and mass gatherings. Formally the sect had no ministers; it was led by laymen obsessed with teaching the Gospel rather than enforcing rules or seeking power through church offices. Church hierarchies were another corruption of the Spirit that the Rock of Ages condemned as blasphemous. It avoided the power struggles so common among the larger and older denominations. Anyone among the brethren could preach; all that was required was the ability to read the King James version of the Holy Bible and to demonstrate the presence of the Holy Spirit in their hearts, which, when manifested during a meeting, was seen as special authority from God to preach. Some were better at that than others, of course, and the best preachers were often demanded by their congregations to preach before them.

Jimmy Jasper became one of the most popular of that breed, so popular, so forceful, so dynamic, that he began to take on the mantle of a leader and soon found himself, not by design, replacing many of the far older men of his church in that role. It was then that he quit the mines and devoted himself full-time to the business of the church. But there was one slight area of disagreement among the Rock of Ages congregations: evangelism. Propagating the Word through missionary work was a basic tenet of the sect, but in the years immediately preceding Jimmy’s birth, the evangelistic fervor had slackened. This was due, in part, to the remoteness of Tabernacle from the large population centers on Kingdom and, in part, to the lack of resources to support missionary work. Money from mining operations was needed for capital improvements and could not be diverted to other purposes because it was the only source of income for the people of Tabernacle. But it was the bitter opposition to their preaching by the longestablished and powerful churches and sects dominating religious life on Kingdom that had stymied the sect’s evangelistic fervor. Their missionaries had been persecuted and laws had been passed to prevent their preaching in the cities and larger towns dominated by the other sects. Many members were uncomfortable with the sect’s giving in to this opposition, but in time the majority, influenced by the practical-minded visionary preachers among them, was content to wait patiently for the Revival that prophecy said would begin with a Sign from heaven. Then and only then would the Word spread among humankind, followed by the Millennium. And until that Sign was given, the Rock of Ages people would keep the flame of faith burning at Tabernacle.

That Sign came with the arrival of the Skinks. Tabernacle Village, Kingdom The alien invaders did not bother the people of Tabernacle again after that first fateful day; with the arrival of the Confederation Marines they had more pressing matters to attend to. When the creatures departed Tabernacle that day on tongues of flame, as they had arrived, the remaining inhabitants took stock. Sixty of their number had been taken. Some believed the visitors had been angels and that those taken had been translated directly to Heaven because some of the most righteous souls in their community had been among that number. Others, especially those who had seen the visitors, swore they were devils sent to punish them for their sins. One of those taken had been Jimmy Jasper, snatched from the street right in front of his own house as his wife stood in the doorway looking on. Blinded by the flashing light, she did not see the angels. In the weeks that followed, the ones abducted came to be referred to as “the Taken.” Of them all, only Jimmy Jasper was ever seen again.

The day of Jimmy’s return was one of great rejoicing, although it started inauspiciously enough. Elmer Swaggart was tending his crops that morning, a brilliant, sunshine-filled day, when he noticed a figure staggering toward him across the rows of tomato plants. The plants were only knee-high and Elmer was busy staking them out so the vegetables would be kept off the ground when he heard someone stumbling toward him.

“I did not recognize him at first,” Elmer said later. “He was thin and ragged and exhausted, but I did recognize him as a poor, wandering soul seeking succor, and so I rose from my knees and took him in my arms.”

Even Zamada, when she first saw Jimmy that morning, found it difficult to recognize him as her husband. But as Jimmy regained his strength and his voice his true identity became known at last to everyone in Tabernacle. The first words he spoke as he began to recover were, “I have seen the Lord God Almighty and He has sent me to save humankind.” A Day of Thanksgiving was declared and as soon as Jimmy had regained his strength, he preached to the multitude, small as it was, of the Rock of Ages True Light Christian Church.

“I was lifted unto Heaven,” he began, “on the snow-white wings of Angels, and it was given unto me that the Lord has a mission He wants me to perform. I was given this mission by none other than the Archangel Gabriel. He told me that the devastation visited upon other parts of our world was the vengeance of the Lord upon the apostate sects that have for too long dominated life and suppressed the Truth in this land. We were spared because we are among the Elect, and I was selected by the Lord God Almighty, as He chose Moses, to go down and set His people free! Friends, I am to preach the Holy Spirit among humankind!

“We have failed in our evangelistic mission, but the Lord God has given me the responsibility of correcting that fault! I am to go forth and start a revival of Faith. Some of you say the spirits who came here and took us were Devils. I say you were blinded by Satan! Those who came here to fight them were blinded by Satan! All of humankind is blinded by Satan! But I was given to see them as they truly are, Angels of the Lord. All of humankind will see them in the True Light too, once they have regained their Faith! We are not to fight these spirits, we are to welcome them! We are to love them as they love us. They are truly the emissaries of the One True All-Loving, All-Powerful, AllKnowing Creator.

“And I warn you now,” he thundered, transfixing each listener with a stare delivered across a rigid forefinger, “if any among you persist in opposing the Angels of the Lord, you shall be destroyed! Those who do not listen to me shall be destroyed. Eternal hellfire shall descend upon those who oppose me. Worlds will burn if the Word is not accepted!”

And so on.

When asked outright what had become of the other people taken by the angels, Jimmy would only say, “They are with Jesus. All those taken were the most righteous of the righteous and they now have received their reward in Heaven.” Of course some people in the congregation knew that maybe, just maybe, some of those taken had not been all that “righteous,”

but no one was going to contradict Jimmy Jasper on the point, and besides, sometimes the Lord moved in mysterious ways.

“I must go,” Jimmy announced to Zamada at breakfast one morning, “today.”

“Of course, husband. Must I accompany you?” Zamada stood in their tiny kitchen, a ladle in her hand.

“No.” Jimmy did not pause while shoveling oatmeal into his mouth. “I cannot be encumbered in my work, wife. I love only the Lord now and the work He has given me. You shall remain here and keep our home in order until you are called.” In truth, he would never think of Zamada again after that morning. Zamada knew that “until you are called” meant until she was safe in the arms of the Lord, that her husband would never return in this life. In a way she was relieved. Jimmy was not the same man who was taken that dreadful morning. Something about him now frightened her. She thought at first it was the spark of the fire of the Lord that burned within him, but he had always been zealous in his faith. No, his spirit had changed somehow and made him different from the man he once was. When she was alone with him now it was as if he were far away somewhere, in some place beyond human comprehension. If that was what happened to a man who’d been called to the Lord, Zamada would rather he lived somewhere else. There were others in Tabernacle who felt the same way, although none would admit it openly: Jimmy Jasper had become a scary man.

“Where shall you go, husband?”

“Earth. Earth is now the focus of the Devil’s plan to destroy mankind’s soul. The government there is a tool of evil. I shall go to Earth and I shall preach the Word and I shall defeat Satan. With the Lord’s help, of course.”

The church elders had raised a large sum of money to finance Jimmy’s mission to Earth, and that very same day, amid prayers, tears, and hosannas, he departed Tabernacle for Inter-

stellar City, where he booked a flight on a starship bound for Earth. While waiting for departure the Lord sent him his disciple. “I am Sally Consolador. I am from the Twelfth Station of Jerusalem and was also taken when the Angels of the Lord came unto us there,” she announced, sitting next to him in the spaceport terminal, “and the Lord has directed me to accompany you and attend to the rod and staff He has given you in your Faith.” Jimmy had been informed he would have help, but he neither asked about it nor questioned the fact. It was not his to question the Lord. The thought did not even occur to him that there might be many other evangels working for revival, only that he had been chosen to lead the movement on Earth. There were many other worlds in need of Salvation, but Earth was the center of the Confederation of Human Worlds, and it was from Earth that Satan was directing his war against the Angels, so Jimmy was very proud that the Lord had picked him to work against Satan in his very lair.