Waiting for the Galactic Bus (7 page)

Her genes were worn out as Roy’s, not much color left to Charity Stovall, the blush gone from her DNA. Below average height because her meagerly nourished bones never lengthened to their full potential. Mouse-brown hair and pale blue eyes, a cast of features the superficial might call plain except for a blunt stubbornness and a set to her eyes that Durer caught in one or two canvases of German peasant women. Delacroix was a damned fool, Barion reflected. He glorified that face into a singing symbol of liberation. Not so. Mere survival. She hadn’t had much of a chance to do anything else for two thousand years.

Just now Charity Stovall’s mind was muddled with glandular longings, definitely ambivalent. Barion paused to note the symptoms before digging deeper into her psyche. Gazing fondly at Roy Stride, fingers intertwined with his, Charity was torn between standards and inclination, a moral skirmish that her subconscious had just ordered her to lose as soon as possible.

Working swiftly through the convolutions of Charity’s mind, Barion found more disparities. Mentally, Roy Stride was average to the point of mediocrity. He would never be more than he was, though his fantasies were totally unfettered by reality. But Charity... here, in this twenty-year-old woman, rusted from little or no use, was an actual mind, capable but anchored like the town-square cannon in the cement block of convention and habit. The capabilities of that mind, its potential for many states, good and bad, went far beyond anything Barion would have suspected or Miss Stovall would ever need in Plattsville. Sooner or later, tied to Roy, that mind would ferment to bitterness. All this in predictable futures; right now the major decision of her life was: should she give in and go to bed with Roy?

He followed them out of McDonald’s, table by table as they greeted young friends. They were the center of the energy that caught his attention in the first place, the names he heard and had to seek out. Now they paused on the sidewalk to embrace and grope at each other in a manner (it seemed to Barion) more urgent than pleasurable. Charity rested her chin over Roy’s shoulder.

“Yes,” she whispered, but her eyes were not that happily decided.

Futures and possibilities radiated from these two in this moment as surely as from Bethlehem.

Roy and Charity turned, still clinging to each other, and walked slowly up the sidewalk past the boarded-up stores to the lighted establishment known in better times as La Mode Dress Shoppe — now reborn as the TABERNACLE OF THE BORN AGAIN SAVIOR. Roy kissed Charity once more, almost conspiratorially, then they went into the storefront church.

Barion had known them as types through the ages. He needed to know their specific probabilities as individuals, all the more since he’d caught the message from Roy’s mind just before the door closed behind them. The message that had disturbed Barion in the first place, the essence of Roy and so many like him whose combined frustration rose from them like the smell from a garbage dump in a long, hot summer.

We know the kind of leader we need. Give us a hero, Sweet White Lord. Someone to look up to who’ll waste those rich wimps and Commoniss niggers and Jews without even thinking twice. And give us someone to look down on, too, the way so many look down on us. Give us a victim, Lord, someone to hang from a tree and pay us back. Before we find one for ourselves like we always have to. Amen.

Barion floated just outside the tabernacle entrance, flashing a message to Topside:

BARION
TO
FELIM
:
RECORDS
RETRIEVAL
,
PLEASE
.

A brief pause only, then the answer burst on his mind in a fervent rush:

ALLAH
IS
THE
ONE
TRUE
GOD
.
ALL
PRAISE
TO
 —

BY
ALL
MEANS
,
BUT
FOR
NOW
JUST
GET
ME
PERSONAL
AND
FAMILY
HISTORY
ON
ROY
STRIDE
AND
CHARITY
STOVALL
,
THIS
LOCATION
.

A professional terrorist during his short life, Felim had also been a hacker whiz who nearly accessed Israeli intelligence computers before the Sabras punched his ticket for good. He spent a great deal of time Topside chanting and praying in his own custom-conceived mosque, but his eidetic memory was invaluable in retrieving information on the spot.

FELIM
TO
BARION
:
SUBJECTS
:
R
.
STRIDE
/
C
.
M
.
STOVALL
.
SPIRITUAL
STATUS
INFIDEL
,
MORE
TO
FOLLOW
...

Barion quickly digested the information Felim transmitted from Topside. When the flow ceased, he absently materialized against a streetlight, tasting the cool night air as he pondered the problem. He’d always disapproved of Coyul’s random interference in human affairs, much of it from worry and guilt about his own youthful mistakes. Leave bad enough alone, he always said after that. Coyul had been right about propensities, but bad enough could no longer be left to get worse.

“Well, why not?” he rationalized darkly. Governments and corporations used plumbers and played dirty pool every day. Without working up a sweat, his little brother was the master plumber of them all, and never a greater need.

COYUL
,
CAN
YOU
HEAR
ME
?

The instant answer:
WHAT
’
S
THE
MATTER
?
YOU
FEEL
WORRIED
.

HOME
IN
AND
JOIN
ME
.

Moments later, Coyul appeared in blazer and foulard, a camel-hair coat thrown over his shoulders to dashing effect. He inspected Barion’s watch cap, pea coat and jeans gone ragged at one knee. “Don’t you ever dress?”

“Only for ex-popes and defunct Episcopalians,” Barion retorted brusquely. “Listen, kid — we’re in trouble.”

    7   

A conspiracy of princes

“Let’s be unobtrusive,” said Barion, dissolving.

Coyul followed suit. “By all means. I’d certainly not want to be seen here.”

They passed like radiation through the tabernacle door. Inside the crowded store-cum-tabernacle, Coyul read the charged ferment of frustration like heat from an oven. Rows of people on metal or rickety wooden folding chairs, intent on the preacher on the small raised platform at the front. Taking Gomorrah as his text, Purdy Simco strode dramatically up and down, open Bible held aloft like a waiter serving dinner.

“Those are the Lord’s words, my friends. That is what He said: that if He found twenty good men, He would not destroy Gomorrah for their sakes.”

From a point just below the preacher’s outthrust jaw, Coyul studied him. “Gomorrah’s old hat. Why doesn’t he pick on something timely?”

“Mr. Simco is a true believer, but no fool,” Barion said. “He knows what he can play to his audience. You won’t hear a word about war or an inflated defense budget. Their factory used to turn out missile components, and they’d like it back, thank you. They want to be saved but they also want to eat. Deviant sex is a safer bet and a hotter ticket.”

Purdy Simco challenged his flock: “Did He find twenty?”

A ragged but fervent spattering of
no
from the faithful.

“And you wouldn’t either in the Gomorrahs we have now, my friends. New York and Los Angeleez, places like that, places just down the road from us, right? Isn’t it a Gomorrah that allows so-called gay rights? And lesbeen rights?”

Coyul looked to his brother for enlightenment. “For this I gave up an evening with Noel and Gertie? You said trouble.”

“So I did.”

“From what? The Classic Comics theology of Mr. Simco?”

“Smell the anger around you,” Barion bade him. “The yearning, the frustration.”

“I did. The whole place could do with a spritz of emotional air freshener.”

“Pure explosive,” said Barion. “I want you to meet the sparks.”

Building to the climax of his excoriation of Gomorrahs past and present, Purdy Simco screwed his doughy face in mincing mimicry of his version of a city academic, his voice a nasal mew.

“He said to me, this college professor, when I spoke to him of the homa-sexuals and lesbeens I saw prancing down Fifth Avenue in their own licensed parade in that so-called great city of New York, he said to me: ‘You have to regard this in its legal and social context.’”

Purdy Simco impaled his audience with a glare of righteous disgust. “Social context. I said to him: Sir” — straight face now, the soft, manly voice of Revealed Truth — “I am looking at it in the context of the most important text in the world. I don’t care what it is in your social context, it’s an abomination in the sight of the Lord!”

The open Bible on high, Simco served dinner again, striding the platform, going for his cadenzas as the applause spattered about him like rain. “SHALL I HIDE FROM ABRAHAM THAT THING WHICH I DO FOR HIM?... WE WILL DESTROY THIS PLACE, BECAUSE THE CRY OF THEM IS WAXEN GREAT BEFORE THE FACE OF THE LORD!”

The applause mounted to fervor. In the front row, Roy Stride leaped to his feet, pounding his hands together. “With sword and fire!”

“There’s our boy, Coyul. Roy Stride.”

“Oh-h, yes,” Coyul remembered. “That’s one of the names I heard.”

“Compulsive joiner. Used to be a Satanist.”

Since the seventeenth century, Coyul had little patience with Satanists of any stripe. Beyond burning black candles and desecrating graveyards, most of them would be just as happy in the local drama club. “Rather inconsistent.”

“Not at all. Read him.”

Blending with the churning essence of Roy Stride, Coyul knew the extremes of Satanism and narrowly defined Christianity were not inconsistent at all in this case. Roy was looking for power and identity. He’d plug into anything that promised deliverance from helplessness and nonentity. All of it tangled now with a strong biological urge toward Charity Stovall —
there she is, that must be her.
Because young Mr. Stride’s simpler motivations were overlaid with sentiment and a panting Protestant need for respectability, he imagined himself seriously in love with Miss Stovall.

“I tried to warn Luther about this: throwing morality back on the frail human conscience,” Coyul reflected. “He threw his inkpot at me. They still show the splat to tourists.”

“Roy has been trying to get it on, as they say, with Miss Stovall for some time. Charity has rationalized it as love herself.”

Coyul turned his attention to the young woman at Roy’s side. “Meaning, I suppose, that she’s found a way to reconcile what she ought to do with what she wants.”

“Precisely. And tonight’s the night.”

Coyul was a study in indifference. “So?”

“They’re the wrong people at the wrong time.”

“So why do you need me? I’m just waiting for a bus, remember?”

“I sampled some background on them. Not the happiest. Please read Miss Stovall.”

Coyul gave Charity another cursory glance — then a closer look. The flicker of interest was not lost on Barion.

“Shall I put time out of joint?” he offered delicately.

“Yes. Just for a moment.”

Tableau in time frozen between one nanosecond and the next: Roy on his feet, Charity yearning up at him with the dazed aspect of someone who has found Ultimate Truth, too dazzled to examine it critically.

Coyul slipped into and blended with her mind. Where Roy was concerned, her mental and physical promptings were hopelessly muddled. Below that level, as Coyul had found with Roy, the years of deprivation, envy and inarticulate rage. Like Barion, he’d already detected the long, brutal history of Europe in her face. Nevertheless, even deeper...