Lazarus Rising Page 5

  "We have to get up. We have to go on," Military Operation gasped, but he made no move to get up or go on, just lay there and let the cold rain wash over him. It had grown very dark, but he wasn't sure if that was due to the lateness of the day or the heavy storm raging all around them. In the dim storm light he could see that Colleen's lips were turning blue and her eyes were closed. He rubbed her cheeks vigorously.

  "Chet, help me!" The two men managed to revive Colleen enough so that she groaned.

  Military Operation lay back in the mud and cursed. He wondered about the three who'd gone downriver. If they went along the river bottom, they'd have been swept away in the surge. But they would die here too, and once dead, be just as dead as if they'd drowned in the river. The shame of it was, he still had no idea how he'd gotten here or who he was before he was taken prisoner. Maybe we're all criminals, he thought. We'd been in a jail, and belonged there. That made him laugh just as there came a momentary lull in the storm.

  Chet looked up from where he lay. "What's so funny?" he asked weakly, and then began to laugh himself. Both men laughed uncontrollably.

  Military Operation laughed so hard he began to cough. He fought to recover himself. "Okay," he gasped at last. "Okay, enough of this! I've never been one to miss cadence on the grinder. Full field inspection in fifteen minutes, goddamnit! I'm getting up and I'm going on." Painfully, he rose to his knees, but could not get back on his feet. The storm returned then in full force and buffeted him onto his elbows. He began to crawl, shouting curses into the wind. In seconds he no longer knew where he was or where the others were. He crawled in a circle.

  He paused to get his breath. Someone was shouting. At him? The wind screamed around him and he thought it carried a voice calling "Charlieeeeeee! Charlieeeee!" That name sounded so familiar. He looked into the wind-driven rain lashing his face, stinging like hale and blurring his vision. Wait! Was that someone's face out there in the rain? Yes, clearly! It was a young face, a man with red hair, he could see the apparition distinctly! He looked familiar. In reaching out toward the man, he became unbalanced and pitched forward into the mud. He shook his head to clear his vision, and when he looked back into the storm, the face was gone. He felt great disappointment. He knew that face. But who was it? Where had it gone?

  "Charlieeeee!" the wind screamed. He realized then that it was the Angel of Death and she was calling to him. He smiled. Well, he'd done his best and now it was time to go. High time. He couldn't feel the cold anymore. He was so tired. He just wanted to rest—forever. The angel came for him and lifted him up and stood him on his feet. Aw, Jesus, she was beautiful! He had never seen such radiant beauty. She smiled at him, and the warmth of her love washed over him. I'm going home, but I'm going out like a man, he thought, and he felt very good about that. They would have soup and sandwiches and beer in heaven. The thin metallic sheet he'd wound about himself had come off long ago, and his packs were somewhere behind him, lost in the mud too, but even if he'd known he was stark naked, he wouldn't have given a damn.

  At that moment the wind died away and the rain slackened. He turned and looked around.

  Before him, a gentle slope rolled away. At the bottom glowed lights in the windows of houses.

  Chapter 5

  The four students, naked, arms bound tightly behind their backs, knelt shivering on the cold concrete floor in one of Wayvelsberg Castle's innermost interrogation rooms. Behind each stood a black-uniformed shooter at rigid attention, a heavy, black truncheon at the ready. The boy and his three female companions appeared much the worse for the interrogations they'd just undergone.

  "How old are you?" Senior Stormleader Herten Gorman asked the boy. As a senior stormleader, a grade in the Special Group equivalent to that of full colonel in the Confederation Armed Forces, Gorman was the ranking officer in the SG.

  "The spirit lives," the young man muttered. "Down with the usurper!" His defiance, although genuine, was somewhat marred by the tears and snot all over his face.

  Gorman nodded to the shooter, a rank equivalent to that of private in the army, standing behind the boy, and he jammed his truncheon into the young man's kidneys. The three girls howled in terror. After the boy stopped retching and got his breath back, Gorman said, "I ask you again, how old are you?"

  "S-Seven-teen," the young man gasped.

  "Good. And what is your name?"

  "Down—Down with the usurper," the young man croaked.

  Gorman nodded at the shooter, who raised his truncheon again, but Dominic de Tomas, who'd been standing by silently, stepped forward and held up a hand. "That will be enough," he said, and the man returned to the position of attention. Gorman looked questioningly at his leader. De Tomas nodded. "That will be enough," he repeated. "Tell me your name," he demanded of the young man.

  "Chris—Christopher Graf," the boy mumbled.

  "They call themselves the Order of the Yellow Rose, my leader," Gorman offered. "They are all second-year students at the College of the Immaculate Conception, a liberal arts school founded by the Fathers of Padua, Cardinal O'Lanners's religious order."

  "O'Lanners," De Tomas repeated, and nodded.

  "You murdered him!" one of the girls screamed, staring up defiantly at the two. Gorman glanced at de Tomas, who shook his head no; the stormer behind the girl made no move to punish her for the outburst.

  Gorman regarded the girl and was struck by the bright blue of her eyes. Her body, despite the recent beatings she'd received, was still in the full bloom of youth. He wondered briefly if she might be the type de Tomas had asked him to find to be his consort, but he rejected that thought immediately. She was less than half his leader's age. They had nothing in common. After sex, what would they talk about? Burning heretics? He almost laughed aloud at the thought. But she'd still be a virgin, unless that boy had already deflowered her, the lucky little swine. The men of the Special Group had strict standing orders never to take sexual advantage of their prisoners.

  "Ah, yes, my dear, we executed the dear old cardinal," de Tomas said. "He was just too goddamned stupid to be allowed to live any longer. You are ‘students,’ then, at this ‘College of the Inaccurate Reception’?" A storm man, a sergeant, standing behind one of the girls burst out in laughter at the pun. "Get that man's name, Gorman!" de Tomas shouted, pointing at the storm man, who stopped laughing immediately.

  "He is a good soldier, my leader!" Gorman protested.

  "I don't know about that, my dear Gorman," de Tomas replied, "but he laughs at my jokes, and I want to keep him close by after this. Very well, then what have these little bastards been up to?"

  "This!" Gorman held out a crumpled leaflet. "They were caught distributing hundreds of these seditious lies!"

  The leaflet read:

  The day of rekoning has come! The rekoning of kingdom's youth with the most abominable tyranny that our people hads ever suffered! Bring down Dominic De Tomas and his minions! Forward in the fight for our free slef-determination, without whitch spiritual values cannot be created and destory the terror of the special group by the power of the spirit! Down with Dominic De Tomas.

  "They didn't waste any time getting started," de Tomas mused. "Vocabulary, purple. Punctuation unsure. Double-check your spelling," he advised the young man. "You misspelled a word in the final sentence." He crumpled the leaflet and dropped it to the floor. He turned to an overstormer, a rank equivalent to captain in the Marines, who'd been standing by the door. "Clean them up. Take them home. I want you to personally escort each to his home. Leave them in the custody of their parents with a warning—and my best wishes. Accentuate my best wishes to their parents. I am giving them back the lives of their children. Then I want you to take a platoon to the college campus. Hang the dean in the quad. Post a detail to make sure the corpse hangs there until it rots. Let the faculty know, any more of this nonsense and we close down the college." He whirled and headed for the door, Gorman close behind.

  "My leader! Those young puppies are traitors! Are
you just going to let them go, to continue spreading their treason?"

  "They deserve to be hung for their poor prose." De Tomas laughed. "What's education coming to on Kingdom, eh, Gorman?" He paused in the hallway outside and put a hand on Gorman's shoulder. "Look, my dear Herten, we have to have the goodwill of the people with us to succeed from now on. We can't get that by killing their children. Those kids, back there? No, Herten, I think their days of treason are well over after what your shooters did to them."

  Gorman reflected that not so long ago de Tomas would have fed the students into the furnace and not thought twice about it.

  "I know what you're thinking, Herten." De Tomas wagged a finger at Gorman. "But we are no longer the Collegium, with a license to kill whomever we want. That worked fine—was actually fun, wasn't it?—when there was nobody really in charge on Kingdom. But all that's changed now." He paused. "And remember this: every man has his price. You find out what that is, and he's yours to control. For some it's money, for others, power, and so on. But the ‘price’ of all parents is the lives of their children. Save their children for them and they'll do anything you want. The word will get around about this morning's little incident, Herten, and the parents of those kids will think I'm a saint. One of our major propaganda themes from now on is that we do what we do for the ‘good of the children.’"

  "Well, with all due respect, my leader," Gorman said, adroitly shifting his argument in keeping with what de Tomas had just announced, "then executing the dean of the college might not be such a wise move—in keeping with your new policy, that is. He is well-respected in the community, and such an action might alienate some of the most prominent people, people whose cooperation we will need."

  "What we need, my dear Herten, is the respect and cooperation of the ordinary people. Get that and the upper classes will follow, and if they don't, it won't matter. Governments are built on the back of the ordinary people. The average man does not give a damn about so-called ‘higher’ education. All he cares about is his family and his livelihood. Our society operates on the labor of the common man. Oh, he knows engineers, scientists, and the lot require college educations, but who does he go to when he needs his plumbing fixed, his landcar repaired, his garbage collected? He respects practical technology and will master as much of it as he needs to live comfortably. But philosophers? Historians? Political scientists and the like? They could all disappear tomorrow and he'd never miss them. Come on." He started off toward the elevators. "Back to the office! We've got to get organized."

  De Tomas continued his monologue in the elevator. The elevators at Wayvelsberg Castle were set to descend slowly but rise quickly. This was done in order to give victims extra time to contemplate their fate as they slowly descended to the interrogation rooms in the bowels of the complex; but staff, returning to the upper levels of the fortress, were expected to be back at work promptly.

  "It's the same with religion, Herten," de Tomas said as they stepped out of the elevator. "The average person does not care one atom for theology. He attends his church or temple or mosque or whatever to be reassured that his gods are looking out for him, and to associate with other members of his sect in the rites of their religion—the more spectacular the rites, the better, because most people are captivated by solemn ceremony. Oh, to be sure," he went on as they entered his private office, "some of the sects might have departed slightly from this norm. The Neo-Puritans, for example, who derived their strength as a sect from the fact that they all involved themselves in their theology through very simple ceremony—‘meetings,’ they called them—and the constant study of their holy book—by everyone, since they had no priesthood, can you imagine that? Anybody in the congregation could stand up and ‘testify,’ as they called it."

  "Yes," Herten agreed. "We were never able to penetrate that sect, to weed out the leaders. The animist sects either, but they are all primitive people who live in the hinterlands and never were of much concern to anyone except a few illegal missionary groups. Last I heard, the animists were eating them." They both laughed heartily.

  "Well, fortunately for our future," de Tomas said, "the aliens rid us of many of those Bible-thumpers, the Neo-Puritans in particular." He rang for a servant, a uniformed member of the Special Group, who came in bearing a tray of coffee and small cakes. They helped themselves after the man had departed. "Now," de Tomas continued, speaking around a mouthful, "we are in a unique position, Herten. We've cut down the highest leaders of the sects. We are in a position to end state-supported religion in this world, and that's just what I am going to do."

  Herten paused his coffee cup halfway to his lips. "We are going to create a secular government?"

  De Tomas nodded and swallowed. "Precisely! Henceforth the sects will be confined strictly to their own internal religious matters, and they will be taxed and regulated by civil authority, just like any other institution. I will establish an entire ministry just for the regulation of the religious orders. We will begin slowly, forcing tiny but acceptable compromises under the guise of good government, until we've enmeshed them totally in a web of regulation. Failure to comply will result in confiscation of lands and properties and, in the case of those brave enough to stand up against us, arrest on charges of malfeasance—or treason. At the same time, we will weaken their authority among the people. I'll do that through regulation but also through a complex of social programs designed to propagandize the population. The Young Folk, our youth organization, will be a key tool in this process. My goal, Herten, is to wipe out the sects."

  Gorman shifted uneasily in his seat. "That will be most difficult, my leader," he said at last. "The sense of religion is so deeply ingrained in the people, that I fear we cannot be successful."

  De Tomas nodded. "It will be difficult and it will take time. It will be a struggle, a ‘church struggle,’ if you will. But we will move slowly and intelligently, Herten, and we will be relentless."

  "But, my leader, what will you replace their faith with? The people must have something to believe in."

  De Tomas laughed. "I can't eliminate God, but I will remove Him, It, Her, Whatever, to the sidelines, where God has been all along anyway. I will tone God down in the mind of the average man of this world; I will replace God with a ‘clockwork’ universe, Herten. Our government will give them bread and work, let them believe what they wish about divinity, but I will brook no interference by the sects in the workings of my world. Now, I wish you to see how I've decided to organize my government." He punched a button on a console, and a huge organizational chart appeared covering one wall of the room.

  "At the top is the Leader, Herten. That is, me. Next down is the Deputy Leader. That's you. You are become my alter ego, Herten. You will represent me everywhere you go. You are my heir apparent."

  Gorman's heart raced and he leaned forward in his seat, his attention now fully concentrated on the chart on the wall. "I—I have never been so honored, my leader!" he gasped.

  "Under us will be a series of deputies or ministers such as Propaganda and Culture, Religion, Treasury, Interstellar Affairs, Defense, Justice, and so on. I have already picked the men I wish to hold these positions and I will give you their names shortly, and then we will call them all to Wayvelsberg to inaugurate their offices. You will notice next under these ministers are more levels of organization, particularly the paramilitary and professional groups such as the Special Group, the Young Folk, and organizations for doctors, lawyers, teachers, and so on. The leaders of these groups will all report directly to you as Deputy Leader. You'll see I have organized down to the lowest level, from district leaders to local leaders to block leaders. Hardly any of those positions have been filled yet. I expect you to pick the men and women for those positions, using the various ministers to ensure we get the most highly qualified and devoted individuals."

  Gorman caught his breath. De Tomas was way ahead of him. "What form will our new government take?" he asked.

  "Socialist," de Tomas replied in
stantly. "Ours is the Socialist Party of Kingdom, the SPK, if you will, but with one very notable exception: we shall not expropriate private industry. We shall use private industry to finance and support our regime, but we shall essentially leave the industrialists alone to profit from their business schemes. That way we shall win their total confidence. Ah," he raised a finger, "but in social programs, we will be completely organized to penetrate even into the family unit. We shall organize and mobilize the people. In time we will transfer their loyalty from their sects to our party. We will promote the concept that we on Kingdom are all one people, one folk, if you will, one Leader, one people, one government, Herten! Henceforth that will be our sacred motto!" He paused and took another cake. "And on our coinage we shall emboss the following slogan: ‘The Common Good Goes Before the Individual Good.’ That is going to be the watchword of our movement.

  "We will organize mass rallies, marches, parades! We will involve everyone in campaigns to help the poor and sick. We'll put Young Folk on every street corner during the winter to collect for the indigent. We'll involve every family on Kingdom, one way or another. We'll imbue the populace with a sense of belonging and patriotism they have never known before! We will have veterans' organizations to honor the sacrifices of those who have served in the armed forces. We will exalt the military virtues over all others, and honor as heroes of the people every man who has served—and in particular those who have died in the military service, whether the stupid sectarian wars that have plagued this world from the first or the recent debacle of the alien invasion. I don't care if a man was shot in the ass while retreating, Herten, he goes into the pantheon of military heroes.