Goodbye, First World — 3
From a distance, Hyungkesuni listened as the Outer God told Tisha's story.
None of the nonsense coming out of the Outer God's mouth touched her in the slightest. She knew perfectly well that it was the truth. Even so, what she heard was a monster fawning over the people of the Kingdom of Anselus because it wanted to live, and so the talk of religious freedom drew no reaction from her at all.
Hyungkesuni had been hunted by more than one religious order. All her life, the gods had stood on the opposite side from her. Someone might declare that people were free to choose their faith, and the only thing that rose in her was a question—why state something so obvious? To a woman who had lived outside the gods, the words you are free to believe carried no weight. It was not even a promise of blessing in exchange for faith in her. If people were free to believe, then those who already followed the Holy God would simply go on following him, and nothing would change. Listening now, the Holy God did seem rather cowardly, but who would abandon a faith over that? Empty talk, then. Just another attempt to deceive.
Thinking so, Hyungkesuni sat on the terrace of a stranger's house and watched the execution platform. Even that, little by little, was losing its savor. It had pleased her to see the Outer God struck in the face, and to watch her fawn with such desperate earnestness, but she wanted something sharper now. The Outer God up on the platform, for instance, wailing and begging to be spared. She was turning over whether she ought to lay a curse when the figure on the platform spoke again.
“I gave Tisha my blessing for as long as he lived, and when he died, the contract was complete. So I went to find him, just as I promised, to receive his final warmth.”
Pure fact. Hyungkesuni knew that warmth was something vital to a person, and she knew what became of those from whom it was taken. She wondered whether this was a confession of sins before death.
People who possess knowledge forget, without meaning to, how people without it will think. Know a thing yourself, and you assume everyone else must obviously know it too. It is a mistake anyone makes, and Hyungkesuni made it. In truth, this is something one learns only by living through it many times—by sharing what one knows with someone who does not, and seeing how they think, and how great an effort it takes to make them understand. Hyungkesuni had never had that experience.
Teaching Yasle? He had already been an expert. Given only that small store of knowledge Hyungkesuni alone possessed, he was learned enough, and brilliant enough, to set it in order and use it in his own way; a wide range of learning was already his. And so she misjudged, without quite realizing it, how the people listening now would receive what they heard.
“But something interfered. It kept me from keeping that last promise.”
There is an expression—a person's warmth. It is a phrase almost impossible to turn to a cruel use. Speak of the warmth of someone on the verge of death, and people hear someone who has come to see them off on their final road. And the Holy God, they understood, had stood in the way of that.
“So I denounced it. And this is what they did.”
No one needed to be told what the something was. The Holy God.
Ordinarily, even words like these would have made it hard for the people of Anselus to think ill of the Holy God. Theirs was a faith from the womb, a god saturating the whole of society; hear someone speak against that god, and you marked them a heretic, and that was the end of it. Curse him, and they would snatch up clubs and come running. A sentence or two from the Outer God was never going to shake the faith of the kingdom.
If only they had not insulted Tisha a moment before.
Human greed had called the disaster down. The slightest jealousy—nothing more than displeasure that someone blessed by the Holy God should exist outside the Holy God Church rather than within it—went tumbling on and on. The faithful had their excuse, of course. The god himself had spoken. Go and strike down the wicked god. He had said it in person. It was hardly different from a supreme authority being handed down: go into the Kingdom of Anselus, and do whatever you please. If that is difficult to picture, imagine switching on a simulation game. Turn one on, and isn't it a gamer's habit to try killing people as cruelly as they can?
The word of a god was a magnificent warrant for doing whatever one wanted, and it melted human reason away at the root.
Everyone of the Holy God Church standing there had studied theology with rigorous care. Not theology alone—they were people of exceptional political ability, for anyone without those gifts would not have been standing there at all. Yet the god's call had been fierce enough to melt even their reason. The rapture of we may do anything blew away not only the rules a person is meant to keep, but the last scrap of caution.
It might have been driving force enough to carry a faith into persecuted lands and spread it. As authority for standing over the weak and cutting them down, as they were doing now, it was far too much. That power drove the Holy God Church across a line they should never have crossed. Had the man been long dead and already slipping from memory, it might have been otherwise. Instead they denounced the father of the nation, whose funeral had been held only yesterday.
A crack opened between the Holy God Church and the people of Anselus, and through that crack the Outer God's words seeped in.
“When humanity has already made a contract with someone, do you break it one-sidedly and pay nothing in return? Or may a god disregard every contract, and it simply doesn't matter?”
A holy knight answered at once.
“How freely you wag your tongue, wicked god! Never shall the vile act of snatching back one whom our Lord has saved be suffered to succeed! Though a profane demon beguile the poor with seductive words, so long as the word of our Lord is with us, we shall walk the righteous path!”
As the speech of a believer, a perfect score. But inside it lay the most fatal fact of all—the one that must never be brought to light.
“Then the Holy God did block the contract from being fulfilled. The Holy God never abandons those who have come into his embrace?”
The Outer God, confirming it one last time. A priest who sensed the omen tried to cut her off, but the holy knight was a little faster.
“It is so! Our Lord, all-knowing and all-powerful, is a greatness the likes of you could never dare approach! Now we shall kill you, and raise His majesty up once more!”
The holy knight had felt the omen too. He drew the sword lodged in his shoulder and lifted it high overhead. But he had already made a mistake that cut to the bone. By answering, he handed the Outer God the right to strike.
“But I got Tisha back. There was interference, yes, but it broke quite easily. I did wonder whether that meant he had been cast aside. Was that the whole of the power set against me?”
It had the shape of a question. It was a dead end. Forfeit omnipotence, or forfeit mercy.
A clean, wet slice. The holy knight said nothing more and brought the blade down across her neck. Too late—but this, at least, would end it. If the Outer God died of it.
The neck parted neatly. No blood sprayed. Where the head had been, a spiderweb of cracks appeared instead, like a bullet buried in tempered glass, and one of those lines ran straight through the head of the holy knight who had severed hers.
“Uh—ah—ah?”
Through the crack, the Outer God reached him and seized the pure white light. She was an instant from taking the warmth right there in front of her; then, calling on a patience beyond anything human, she stopped. She licked the light instead.
The moment her tongue touched it, the holy knight's memories became hers, and the light turned black with a violet sheen. The change did not stop at the light. In an instant his hair went purple, and the healthy brown of his sun-darkened skin blanched white.
A murmur. Startled cries spread on every side, and the other holy knights nearby leveled their swords at the one who had cut the Outer God's neck.
A grinding crack. Something was being crushed within the fissure—more precisely, the rim of the hole at the center of the cracks was crumbling bit by bit as the hole widened. Anyone who had ever heard glass or ice split under a heavy weight could guess, roughly, what the sound meant. Something immensely heavy rested over that hole.
The sound lasted only a moment. The cracks splayed in every direction were sucked back into the hole. Inside turned out and outside turned in, and the hole vanished as if it had never been. Where it had stood was a girl with long purple hair: the wicked god whose head had been cut off only moments before, without a single wound.
“Kill me, and you receive a blessing. I won't force you to believe in me from now on, of course. If you want to believe in the Holy God, then believe. Humanity has freedom of religion.”
She paused there, to set her thoughts in order. The silence bought exactly what she had wanted—a stretch of time in which the crowd fixed on her words. She had not meant the rest of it, but the pause fell so that it seemed to set the next sentence apart, and give it weight.
The Outer God smiled, bright and soft.
These were the words she spoke the instant she had the situation in hand—she who, as her head came off, had thought, Ah. So I'm sinking back beneath the surface again. Her improvisation, if nothing else, was extraordinary. She never forgot to lay a little poison along the words. Quite naturally, she had explained that the Holy God would abandon those who received his blessing.
At those words the holy knight, Martin, faltered and gave ground. The fever of faith that had filled his head went out, and the cold of reality settled where it had been. He looked around. Holy knights who had been his comrades were pointing their swords at him, and that wounded him. All the years he had lived, everything he had poured into the Holy God Church—and they turned their blades on him like this?
“The Holy God has abandoned you, just as he did Tisha. Now then. Let me make a proposal.”
So the Outer God offered. Forced upon him or not, he would not leave this Outer God be. Holy Knight Martin resolved as much. But the proposal was not meant for him.
She rose from the execution platform where she had been bound, and turned. Then she bowed her head toward the people of the Holy God Church.
“I will die here, so please forgive the others. Like this man, all I did was bestow a blessing upon humanity. I also bear the sin of having given those sunk in the deepest despair a terrible power called Explosion, so I will disappear from this place.”
Not yet. Still, not one person understood what the words meant. Hyungkesuni knew that the Outer God was the phenomenon itself—the sudden bursting of the defeated, the very thing that had become the motif of primitive faith. But she had never prayed to a god, and so she did not know what was being said. She did not know the deepest reason the Future Hope Church had taken hold of people's hearts.
The god of the lowest.
Declaring that this was what she was, she forgave them, and she proclaimed that people also had the freedom not to believe in a god. The Outer God smiled with genuine happiness.
At that moment, in a mansion on the outskirts of the capital, three people finished the book.