Gerun, the Heretic. William Maltese
into the silence.
“Who?” Gerun asked, young and wanting all the answers. If Kalvin didn’t have them all, it was obvious the old man had more of them than Gerun did.
“Didn’t you feel His presence?” Kalvin asked. “Here with us. Called by the ritual.”
“Who?” Gerun repeated. He wanted a name.
“Who indeed!” Kalvin replied, getting to his feet and brushing gravel balls from the leatahrer swathing his knees. “Would the incinerated Book have told us? Would Panrun-Ru have told us? Could Warluck tell us even now? The god is there, whoever He might be. Someone, something, powerful enough to set the Religio-College trembling.”
“But not nearly strong enough to save us,” Gerun said; more a statement than a question.
“Ah, my boy!” Kalvin said, helping Gerun to his feet. “You resent the prospect of dying only because you are so young.”
“And you don’t resent it?” Gerun challenged.
Of course, of course,” Kalvin admitted. “But I’m closer to death by natural causes than you are, brought there not by Warluck and his machinations but by the mere passing of time. We all die. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then some other time. If not from fiss poisoning, then from a dew dart shot by a gimlian sprouted unaware in the darkness as we trip on it. Hundreds, thousands, millions of ways to die.
“Yet, Warluck thrives! Protected from death by his gods, while the god of Jon Missionary deserts that man’s kin.”
“If there is a god of Jon Missionary,” Kalvin reminded.
“But you insinuated.…”
Kalvin raised his hand in interruption. “We must be very careful that we don’t read into this more than there is to be read,” he warned. “What was Jon Missionary, anyway, but a man without all his faculties? Maybe he wasn’t mumbling of God but pretty sounds to entertain his tortured mind, and we—Melina-Lu, Panrun-Ru, you, me, Warluck—all misinterpret it wrongly. What then?
“Do you believe he was nothing more or less than an imbecile?” Gerun challenged. It confused him the way Kalvin could go from Jursimmic ritual to Missionary ritual, from belief in Jon Missionary’s god, to a denial of Him.
“It’s of little importance—except to me—what I believe is it?” Kalvin answered. “What’s important to you is what you believe. And I would suggest, at the moment, that you’re more apt to label Jon Missionary a half-wit than I am.”
Gerun flushed with anger and embarrassment, furious that the old man had so easily accessed his mentat, while Kalvin’s mentat blocked Gerun’s entrance like a wall of grinlind against tansic barbs.
“If He’s there, He would help us, is how you reason it,” Kalvin said, his voice offering no argument.
“Wouldn’t He?” Gerun insisted.
“How am I to say?” Kalvin asked with a voice sounding more and more tired. “How very little we know of Him, Gerun. If, in fact, He is even there. Our link between Him and us was a deranged one. Perhaps all we need to rally His support is the right password, the right key, the proper format for making our request. Every god in the Religio-College has its own format for conversing with humans, doesn’t it? Why not this one?
“But this god should know his linkage to us was faulty, shouldn’t He?” Gerun persisted.
“And maybe He knows it wasn’t faulty at all,” Kalvin argued, playing Delvin’s-Advocate. “Maybe we perceive it as faulty only because we are too stupid to follow whatever directions have been correctly given.”
“You’re talking in circles!” Gerun accused.
“I talk as a man who was a gyrolist in his lifetime, not a thelogan,” Kalvin reminded. “I know plants, not gods. I can only wish you better luck. There’s yet time for you to figure out the clues and unravel the puzzles. Granted, not as much time as you might have liked, but.…”
He shrugged again, finally looking very much the very old man he was.
“Here, sit with me a minute more,” he said, moving to a rough nature-hewn stone and leaning, rather than sitting, against it. He patted a place on the white-veined surface beside him. Gerun joined him.
“There was a plague before you were born,” Kalvin said.
“The Bendu Plague,” Gerun confirmed.
“In which millions of people died,” Kalvin said. “The Religio-College soothsayers pegged the culprit right off. Sillona-Xi, angry because She’d been short-changed the year before when the drought at Kistol made for a poor harvest.”
“I don’t worship Sillona-Xi!” Gerun snapped.
Kalvin breathed his long sign and tried again.
“There was a landslide in the Bytamax Province of Rhinic many terns ago. Six-thousand people dead as a result. Three-thousand injured. A mountain leveled, three valleys filled to the brim. Why? Because Raglistim was angered by the slowness with which workers were clearing His grotto at Hypernum.”
“I don’t worship Raglistin!” Gerun informed, angry because he was finally getting the point.
“Yes,” Kalvin agreed, his mentat having accepted the admission the boy was unprepared to make verbally. “The gods are often as vengeful as they are merciful. Who’s to say Jon Missionary’s god is any the less vengeful? He did, after all, allow His prophet to endure Xeon brain-blank, didn’t He? Not a very pleasant occurrence for any man, from what I’ve heard. Although it’s more merciful to the outer shell than Warluck’s sloppier-devised mind-erase.”
“But his memory wasn’t completely gone,” Gerun insisted, referring to Jon Missionary’s remembrance of his name and melodious words.
“So, we have always wanted to believe,” Kalvin said. “Why? Because it’s far more flattering to our egos to think that we’ve descended from a prophet than from a half-wit, isn’t it, my boy?”
If looks could kill, Kalvin would have been a dead man. He knew Gerun, though, and he loved him more than he’d loved any of his other grandchildren. It had always been the boy’s passions which had excited Kalvin, which excited him now.
“Which of the Religio-College’s pantheon of gods do you believe in, Gerun?” Kalvin asked, knowing the answer.
“I believe in no god!” Gerun said too quickly, too loudly.
“So easily you deny Him with one breath while expecting Him to succor you with the breath just preceding.”
“I meant, I don’t know His name,” Gerun corrected, feeling like a fool. The old man had led him into the trap like a goosen could lead a flock of gysins to slaughter. Gerun was prepared to admit no more.
“A nameless God, then?” Kalvin persisted. “One not of the Religio-College perhaps?”
Gerun could hide nothing from the old man. The mentat-linkage Kalvin shared with his grandchild was so strong that each feared what loss he would suffer if and when the other died.
“Jon Missionary’s god?” Kalvin prodded. Gerun was helpless to keep the answer from him. “I do believe in Jon Missionary’s god,” Kalvin admitted, marveling at the surprise in Gerun’s eyes. Did the boy really not know that, really not see that? Did Gerun really believe himself alone in suspecting Jon Missionary was a true messenger from on high? Did Gerun really believe he was the only one angry because the holy message and messenger had gotten so unbearably scrambled along the way?
“Listen to me, Gerun, for I have yet something more to say,” Kalvin said, “and we’ve already dangerously overextended our time in which to say it. It’s important that you learn to put Jon Missionary and his legacy in proper perspective, even though it will probably be as impossible for you to manage as it has been for me to do so, not to mention all