Kill The Monster, Chapter 24

XXII. MOTHER KNOWS BEST

The first and last time the train stopped, it nosed out into bright sunlight. He could feel the light on his arm and shoulder through the window. The air that invaded the car when the doors unlocked and opened was warm and smelt of new-mown grass, pine sap, and the reek of a thousand flowers having sex on the breeze with bees. The scent of roses, thyme and violets was almost oppressive. He could hear bees, and the sound of birdsong, missing from the Earth for some time since the new defoliants had been introduced in the 2020's for the prosecution of the war in China, was deafening.

Up above, he could see clouds slowly and lazily drifting over a cornflower-blue sky. The faint scent of engine oil, rat turds and brake dust from the railway was a distant memory. The doors swished shut behind him, and the train departed, backing up into a brick-lined tunnel, slowly so as not to disturb the air. This could not be real; he had to be underground. Or had the train passed through another Gate as it went? Or had the helicopter passed through one while he was busy tormenting Bram? If so, he could be anywhere. Or anywhen.

The train had pulled into a double colonnade of angels;one-piece marble caryatid columns supporting an arched ceiling, holding swords, weighing scales, trumpets, and other angelic commonplaces. Each angel had to be well over ten metres tall. The nearest angel's feet rested on a podium which, in itself, had to be many tonnes in weight, labelled THE ANGEL MOHAMMED in deeply incised letters. Sean reflected ruefully on just how deeply wrong three words could be. An angel with the name of a prophet heretical to Christianity. Check. An image of Mohammed. Check. Mohammed had Sean Agnello's face; check.

He looked up at the face - slightly trimmer, with slightly less weight around the jowls. Either artistic licence or liposuction. Looking along the line of cherubim, they all had the same face, from Michael through Raphael all the way to Li Hongzhi, a last minute addition to the Book Church's angelic head count when Fa Lun Gong had joined the Faithful in 2017.

There was nothing else in the station, which stood in the middle of woodland like an exceptionally well-concealed Greek temple. Behind him, porters who probably all possessed PhD's in dogmatic orthodoxy were unloading crates and packages from the rear cars, carrying them off into the trees where some invisible infrastructure would dispose of them.

Bram was no longer with him. He wondered when that had happened. He still seemed to have a modest cortège of armed escorts, and had no doubt that a vast array of surveillance gear and weaponry was trained on him through the trees, but he still had the illusion of being very nearly alone.

Huge buildings towered over the trees; massive statues, campaniles, colonnaded domes. Eastern architecture melded fluidly with Western, the only architectonic stricture seeming to be that all things should be gigantic, obvious, and blinding white. Beneath the trees, peacocks strutted - peacocks and other, more exotic birds, some with teeth, others with four or more wings. An African chameleon lazed on a branch, happily cycling through the spectrum. Sean was almost certain wild uncustomized chameleons did not subscribe to such behaviour.

An avenue led off among the trees. At first, he had the impression it was lined with telegraph poles, until he saw the poles had crosspieces. Roughly cut, apparently by hand, from a variety of woods, and fixed together with wooden pegs and hemp rope by an iron-poor civilization, it was an Appian Way of crosses - commissa, immissa, decussata, simplex, low tau, high tau, all versions of the Unhappy Tree. Thankfully, the crosses were unoccupied. As each of his Committee escorts slunk past each upright, the escort crossed himself accordingly.

"They're originals", said Sean, as soon as the realization hit him. "Original performance art by Ahenobarbus and Pilate. See the confident, vibrant nail strokes. Jesus." He walked up to a nearby cross labelled Sanctus Petrus, put an arm on the wood to steady himself and vomited into the grass. It came out green, but not a rich, vibrant green - rather, a disappointing bilious verdâtre that clearly spoke of recent regurgitation. His legs trembled as it emptied out of him onto the foliage.

His attendants helped him back onto the path, tidying his clothing as they walked. He was surprised at having vomited - he had not expected to, had had no warning of it at all.

The pathway turned, and the avenue of crosses could now be seen to lead to the first steps of a marble staircase which seemed to have been built for giants. The stairway rose through a series of gravity-defying arches, ogival arches with the apexes cut by a second ogive, Gothic cathedral architecture mixed with Moorish. The whole arctic white front of the building which the arches entered was punctuated by windows of this exact pattern, of wildly varying sizes, some of them surely mere tiny decorative afterthoughts serving no practical purpose, some of them vantage points for giants. The building's roof was a cascade of silver domes reaching towards heaven with stalagmite-like pilasters.

He vomited twice more on the way up the staircase. At least one of his attendants, he was cetain, secretly pocketed a sample of his sacred vomit in a pre-prepared jar; doubtless it would fetch hefty prices on the black religious black market. Maybe imams and bishops would fight over it.

Beyond the archways, the steps kept going up and up; beneath, he could see massive internal spaces, cyclopaean arcades surrounding tranquil scented pools of carp and lotus.

No. This is me. More to the point, it's him. They're filled with electric eels and candirú fish.

The staircase ended in a bone-white enclosure resembling a Greek temple. This was not the dignified, purposeful structures Greek temples had been in history, however, with ancillary buildings and roofs to keep off the rain. This one was open to the sky, a Hollywood fantasy based on looking too many pictures of roofless ruins. There was a pool in its centre, perfectly reflecting the turquoise of the sky. In the pool, a man was swimming back and forth, turning expertly underwater, surfacing each time in a crawl, processing the water underneath him with relentless efficiency. Sean's entourage stood dutifully aside, not daring even to speak.

At length, the swimmer grew bored and shot to the side, raising himself from the water with one hand. He was naked; despite the familiarity of the sight, Sean found it oddly obscene. The excess fat he recognized from his own bedroom mirror had gone. The muscle on the other man's chest and shoulders looked as if carved from marble by an overenthusiastic Renaissance homosexual. Overweight, overdressed, and flabby in streetgoing adaptations of a bedroom slippers, Sean felt thoroughly out of place.

The other man noticed Sean's attention. "Don't worry", he said. "As I am now, so will you be." He accepted a towel from a handy acolyte and began to dry himself.

"I'll come out of the chrysalis and become a beautiful butterfly", slurred Sean, without any perceptible trace of belief.

The swimmer stopped towelling himself suddenly, turned, and brought the towel up to his face, sniffing it.

He turned to the acolyte who'd handed him the towel.

"I've used this towel before."

The minion cringed silently.

"I have, haven't I? I can smell my own stink on it, the reek of the worldly body. Is there an explanation for this?"

The acolyte looked at two towel piles on the floor, both neatly folded. One would be the Fresh pile, one the Used. "You took it from the wrong pile, is that it?"

The acolyte looked back to the Pastor and nodded without being able to make eye contact.

The swimmer shrugged and smiled, spreading his arms wide. "Then what recourse do I have?"

"None, Pastor."

The Pastor made a gesture of benediction, and placed his hand on the man's shoulders. "You will go to Hell, and burn there for all eternity. Mercy shall there be none. Forever shall you writhe outcast in fire, bereft of the blessed sight of Our Lord and His Angels." He turned away slinging the towel over his shoulder. "Pick up the used towels on the way out."

The acolyte bowed and departed with a head heavier than worlds.

"Can't get the staff, you know", joked the Pastor. "Sit down, please, take the weight off."

Sean remembered seeing no chairs, and searched about himself in a muddle. Gently, an assistant slid what proved to be a white raffia garden seat beneath his buttocks. He sat, certain that the seat would quickly become a personal spinal hell.

"Well, then", said the Pastor, settling easily into a long-legged sprawl on the poolside. "Isn't this cosy? I'm sorry, you appear uncomfortable."

Sean shook his head. Damned if I'm showing weakness to you.

"Suit yourself."

"What will happen", said Sean, shaping the words carefully as they tried to wriggle alcoholically out of the corners of his mouth, "to the man you just damned?"

"Oh, he'll kill himself, I expect. They usually do. Odd, that learning of their damnation should make them so eager to get to it quicker." Sean-from-2035 smiled.

"But he isn't damned."

All trace of humour vanished from the face. "I'm sorry, I don't follow."

"How can he be damned. All he did was fail to pick up a towel from the right pile."

The Pastor genuinely seemed to be having difficulty comprehending the logic. "But I told him he was damned."

"What difference does that make? Are you God all of a sudden?"

The eyes that stared back at Sean were empty of deceit and blue as faience. Contact lenses, or an actual change to the colour of his irises? "Well...yes. I would have thought you'd have worked that out by now. I've changed in a number of exciting ways. I've worked on the shoddy state you got this body into, for example." He cast a disapproving glance at Sean's puffy midriff, and extended a leg that was an embarrassment of muscle development. "I run ten kilometres every day, and swim a mile. A lot of it is assisted by medical science, of course, though hard work is still involved. In a few years' time, my physicians tell me they might be able to reverse the ageing process. This body will live forever."

"That still", said Sean even more carefully, "doesn't make you a god."

A finger was upthrust like a caltrop spike. "The God. One God. God singular. If you persist in this foolishness I'm afraid I shall have to -"

"Damn me?" Sean smiled, and formed syllables with exquisite care through lips that refused to do his bidding. "Can' do it; sorry. Kill me? Can'. You're still alive. Abou' all you can to me is -"

The finger was upraised again; the pain hit, tunnelling down a thousand different nerve bundles, conveying more than he would have believed possible. But I'll be damned if I'm showing weakness. Not this time. Not now.

The pain stopped; he realized he was hugging his own knees. He collapsed upward into the chair, exhaling. In a matter of seconds, he had covered himself in sweat.

"- cause you agonizing pain", finished Sean-from-2035 quietly. He rose to his feet, hands clasped behind his back, began walking the length of the pool. "I understand your position, if not your insolence. Let me allow you to see the truth through my eyes. How did I become Pastor? I'm thinking", he said, "of two events in particular."

"You became multimillionaire", said Sean slowly. "An' you were elected President."

The Pastor waved away these irrelevances crossly. "No, no, no. What made the millions and the Presidency possible? I'm talking about scientific advances."

"Oh. Well then, turannone an' the dimensional translator. Though I don' think turannone counts as an advance."

The Pastor wheeled on Sean triumphantly. "Precisely! And which scientists, what engineering genius made possible these two inventions?"

Comprehension began to dawn greyly. "Erm. I'm really not quite sure."

"Nobody! Absolutely nobody! You received a sample of viral spores back in 2013; from this were developed the very first helotonoviruses and turannonoviruses. Who created that sample? Genetic technicians from 2023 who had those strains on file. Why did they have them on file? Because the very first helotonoviruses had been developed from the sample delivered to you in Venice. Where did that sample come from? From -"

Sean flapped a weary drunken hand. "Okay, okay. I ge' the picture. Turannone comes from nowhere. Ditto for the dimensional translator. Sho where do you think they came from?"

"From God." The eyes burned like lakes of sulphur on a Jovian moon, black within azure. "I thought them into being."

"I'm sure", enunciated Sean carefully, "I would've remembered."

"You think things into being daily!" The Pastor extended an arm. "I have only to put out a hand, think 'APPLE', and an apple exists." A fist-sized dimensional gate opened just above his palm, and a shiny red English Pippin dropped into it. He took one bite of the apple and tossed it into the pool.

Sean shook his head like a shark making threat gestures. "You made a deal with yourself to go five minutes into the future and get the Translation Bureau to drop an apple onto your hand", said Sean, proud of his ability to still speak three-syllable words. "That's not being God. That's being a very powerful man."

"Cannot a man be a god? Does the Bible not tell us so?"

"That would ashume", slurred Sean, "the Bible isn't a heap of Crap." He emphasized the final word, almost shouting it.

The Pastor placed a concerned hand on his wrinkled brow like an American courtroom hack. But I'm confused, Mr. Dahmer. Earlier in your testimony you claim not to have eaten anybody. "But Jesus died on the cross for Man's sins. The Church has been there to see it."

"The Future Church", spat Sean, "have been there to see it. Our own Church have been warned off it. Redaction Office operatives who disobey get found crucified by archaeologists in catacombs. What are you hiding between zero and thirty A.D.?"

"Why", beamed the Pastor, "me. I realized the Biblical crucifixion story was so obviously a bizarrely-concocted fairy tale that only one man in history could possibly give it life." He spread his arms wide. "Behold that man."

Sean's eyes were growing heavy. Only horrified indignance was keeping him awake, and perhaps even conscious. "You had yourself crucified?"

"Certainly did. More specifically your self, actually. I had to bring the whole Biblical story to life, so I took you out at intervals throughout our early life - as a newborn for the Nativity, as a boy for the questioning of the priests at the Temple, finally as a thirty-year-old man for the Crucifixion itself."

Sean was dumbfounded. "You did what?"

"Don't worry, we only took you out for a few days or weeks at a time. You remember when you were born, those two days the hospital staff insisted you stay in an incubator? In those two days you crossed the desert into Egypt. We substituted a clone baby in the maternity unit. One me looks very much like another. Present company accepted, of course."

"And when I was a boy?"

"We took you out when you had chicken pox when you were nine. Neither of your parents had ever had it; you had to be admitted to hospital. We buried the memories later using a traumatic memory editing technique developed by Committee scientists to treat homosexuality."

He was going cold even through the glow of alcohol. "The dream."

The Pastor nodded excitedly. "It was hardly necessary, of course, to use traumatic editing to bury the memory of the actual crucifixion. Carefully managed, that was traumatic enough on its own."

Sean looked up at the Pastor. "The grenade wound in Bosnia. When the shrapnel came right through my helmet. It never did, did it? I never spent ninety days out of it in hospital, did I?"

The Pastor shook his head, smiling. "No. We were in the wilderness. We were riding into Jerusalem in triumph on ass-back, treading palms before us. And at the end, we were securely fastened to a strong pine board using specially selected hypoallergenic nails..."

Sean turned his hands over. The insides of the wrists still bore what he'd been inured to regard as shrapnel scars. He'd put his hands up to protect his face, stupidly, instead of diving for the ground like a good soldier, when the grenade had gone off. Luckily he hadn't been close enough to catch more than five small splinters, but the largest one had speared clean through his left side, close as an ace's thickness to the heart -

He looked up.

"The code phrase used to unlock traumatic memories", said the Pastor, "is the monotreme becomes inviolate."

A forest of crosses, stakes and graven images rushed towards him.

"Jesus", said Sam.

"Among others", said the Pastor.

Shadrach. He remembered the heat of the furnace, being flung into its open mouth onto a sea of coals, falling through rainbows into the relative cool of dead banked cinders, flat on his back, having the breath knocked out of him, sitting up groggily to see Nebuchadnezzar's fire tenders gawping in at him in holy terror...

Daniel. He remembered the orange eyes glowing in the dark, bared fangs like knifeblades, huge animals frantic to get away from him, to remove themselves from this new two-legged thing that smelt wrong and rotten, that was sweating out enough turannone to turn up a human being's nose, never mind the delicate senses of a discriminating savannah carnivore...

Sebastian. He remembered being bound hand and foot, feeling the impacts of arrow after arrow, fastidiously sharpened to stab surgically straight through the point they were aimed at without bruising adjoining vital organs. Feeling the sickening realization that he had been cut clean through and nailed to the post behind him. Feeling the vibration of the arrows quivering in his flesh...

He remembered being martyred again, and again, and again.

"You", he breathed. "You did this to me."

"A younger you", grinned the Pastor. "Congratulations, you are every other major religious figure in history. How old do you think you are, exactly?"

"Fifty", said Sean. "I should be fifty-three, but I spent three years being dead."

The Pastor shook his head. "You're actually closer to fifty-five. All of the mises-en-scène and martyrdoms we've been taking you out to do while you sleep, while you're unconscious, while you're anaesthetized, have greatly aged you. We can take you out for a year between sunset and sunrise, blank your memory, and you'll still think you're simply waking up the morning after, as if you'd been away with the fairies. In fact, many of our younger, more eager-to-impress Committee members believe the old Irish stories of time-accelerated environments that can be accessed via the openings to sidhe or fairy mounds may lead us to remaining nests of the Resistance."

"You could have killed me", said Sean. Then he thought a drunken moment, and added, "ah."

"Precisely!" The Pastor's eyes sparkled like electrical shorts in a nuclear detonator. "As a man who has seen his own future, you were uniquely positioned to fill this role, fill all these roles. I know I could attempt to martyr you a thousand times over, and God would return you to life every time."

"That's true, but it's also true", said Sean, wagging an unsteady finger, "of a hundred thousand Committee people who've travelled in time."

"But they are not you! After the myriad cataclysms of recent years, well might the Yehudim, the Christians, and the Dar Al Islam ask, How do we know we are the Chosen People? And the answer is, Look around you. You are still alive. If you had not been chosen, you would not be alive to know it. It was you who hung on the cross, you who lay in the lions' den, you who led the aperu out of Egypt, and the past cannot change. Imagine my delight when the very first field reports reached me of a Christ who had my face! Immediately and with a light and skipping heart, I set about arranging your crucifixion..."

"I see", said Sean. He thought the matter through to an unpleasant conclusion. "Do I have any more crosses to bear?"

The Pastor frowned slightly. "A few, a few. St. Polycarp of Smyrna was an old man when he was martyred, burned to death by the Romans. And Saint Simeon was crucified at the age of one hundred and twenty. I myself, therefore, still have a deal to do. I also still have a great deal of hadith to dictate. And there is the great work of the building of the Ark, which never seems to near completion -"

"With two of every animal?" blinked Sean.

"Seven of every animal", reproved the Pastor. "Two only if those animals are unclean. Read your Bible. Where would we be if we had one ram for every ewe? The Ark is to be used to repopulate the Earth following the subsidence of the floodwaters, for I have looked out upon the Earth and found it sinful. The Ark shall also contain a sustainably large genetic database of every species and subspecies on Earth, and shall come to rest on Mount Ararat when the cleansing flood has ended."

"You're going to destroy the Earth?" said Sean. Surprisingly, this did not surprise him.

"I am going to save the Earth", said the Pastor, beaming like a boy scout. "Tough love. Have you and I alike not always been distressed by the number of people teeming on the planet? By the destruction of species? By the slow growth of cities across the green land like a cancer?"

"You're going to kill everyone on Earth", said Sean.

"They cannot be killed", reassured the Pastor, shaking his head. "They have immortal souls." He extended a demonstrative hand, and an exquisitely-realized museum display, possibly weighing several tonnes, fell out of the air a whisker to Sean's right with a crash that raised a fountain of damaged marble, bouncing to rest on powerful springs. The display showed a gorgeously-rendered Earth without polar caps, with sea levels even higher than those Sean remembered from his own time. North America had become separated from South America by a shallow sea, and Africa from Asia. The Netherlands, Bangladesh, the Rann of Kutch, and all places ending in -nesia, no longer existed. The Caspian Sea had eaten Astrakhan. When the globe, with its mobile swirling clouds, turned beyond the terminator, the lights of huge grotesque cities glowed in the dark. London now encompassed most of south-east England. Sydney's suburbs now touched Canberra. Mexico City was slowly becoming Mexico.

"Four fun-sized asteroids", said the Pastor playfully, "called Leukos, Pyrrhos, Melas, and Chloros." As he spoke, images grew out of the matt black surface of the display, regular chunks of rock with craters pockmarking them like juvenile acne, far larger than any asteroid their shape should be, and began circling the doomed Earth like hungry sharks. "Each one, of course, is only about thirty or forty miles across in reality. They'll be removed from the Asteroid Belt using nuclear explosives, and will impact here, here, here, and here - " he indicated the centres of the Arctic, Atlantic, Indian and Pacific Oceans. "Massive shockwaves, tsunamis miles high, and I would imagine probably also four new minor continents created where the asteroids punched through the oceanic crust, each the size of Iceland. The only life surviving will be airborne - insects, alpine choughs on the wing, perhaps - and marine. Some inland sea life, mostly from the Caspian, Aral or Mediterranean, where the submarine shockwave won't be as fierce. And then we will begin anew. I have been collecting species from the past six hundred million years. Dinosaurs will return to Africa, woolly mammoths, woolly rhinoceroses, and all manner of other lanate fauna to Antarctica. South America will be entirely marsupial, Australia exclusively monotreme, and Indonesia and New Guinea inhabited by colossal piscivorous amphibians and rhizodonts. Great Britain will be home to every fabulous creature of British myth - unicorns, wyverns, basilisks, and amphisbaenas. My genetic technologists have been producing sterling work in this area. An island in the Pacific will be dominated by giant spiders. Lake Baikal will be home to shoals of specially bred giant Anomalocaris. Madagascar will be home to herds of gorgonopsids and dinocephalians from the Permian period. Sri Lanka will be inhabited by dwarf elephants, dwarf allosauri, homo floresiensis, giant tortoises, giant flightless pigeons, giant flightless Australian killer ducks. Imagine a dinosaur running in terror from a duck! There will be more biodiversity than the Earth has ever seen before, except in Madagascar, where there will be no lemurs, as a matter of principle." He looked down his nose, which would one day be Sean's nose, at Sean. "No challenge to Heaven's authority can be tolerated, however symbolic."

"But everyone will die."

"Yes." The Pastor shrugged. "Everyone will die. Population needs to be controlled. I am a vengeful god. You will recall how Nero was thought to have the Great Fire of Rome in order to clear the way for his own grand projects - the Colossus, the Domus Aurea, and so forth."

"Nero", said Sean, swaying in his seat, "also thought he was a god."

"Yes. But you and I know he was wrong." The Pastor clicked his fingers, and the Earth display dropped into a rainbow-coloured hole intime and space, leaving only chipped and injured marble behind it. "Nero was also an Emperor. He believed that he embodied the state, and had the right to take decisions for his fellows. You and I know that this is not true." The Pastor was looking directly at Sean now, like a gemcutter appraising a diamond in the rough. Is this a stone I can use, or does it have flaws beneath the surface?

"But that is exactly the same as -", began Sean. The Pastor held up a finger.

"I", he said, "am a god."

He rose to his feet and circumambulated the pool. "I am abdicating responsibility for the petty, day-to-day affairs of men to men themselves. Human beings must have free will. On the more important questions - whether they live or die, whether they eat or starve, whether or not they can abort their babies - I will continue to hold sway. But on matters of what colour their town hall should be, or what legally constitutes a fruit and what a vegetable, I intend to defer to popular opinion.

Sean was astounded. "You're giving away power to a, an Nelected Assembly?"

The Pastor's head snapped round. "I am doing nothing of the kind. Elections imply leaders, imply Nero, imply Pharaoh and Herod. I intend to make maximal use of information technology. Every citizen will carry a personal foolproof DNA-coded voting terminal and vote daily on every issue. If they fail to vote, they will be executed. Bram Hamed is implementing the system to my direction. All citizens in all settlements and colonies begin voting tomorrow."

"You're enforcing democracy with capital punishment."

The Pastor nodded. "On simple issues within the ken of man, yes. It is time they took responsibility for their own world, without crying out like babies to less honest men to make all their decisions for them." He exhaled, rubbed the back of his own neck, and suddenly appeared all of the sixty-five years that were piled on him.

"On that one", said Sean, "I agree. But whass the point of giving them responsibility juss before killing them?"

"Men must be free to save or damn themselves", said the Pastor. "Free will is at its most important in the last second of life. Besides, I simply can't stop them breeding. I had to throw my lot in with the anti-abortionists to gain political support early in the Enterprise, and a god cannot be seen to be wrong. I managed to thin their numbers temporarily through war, but now that the party of Heaven has proved victorious, there are no more wars. I am left with only one final answer, to clean the slate and start again. The Bible provides precedent."

"The Bible says", said Sean, breathing hard, "God sent a rainbow to say it would never happen again." He had a pressing need to vomit, but there more immediate activities on his busy schedule.

The Pastor shrugged. "A god can change his mind."

"I thought you said a god could not be wrong."

The Pastor's eyes gleamed with sudden malice. Sean had seen that look before, on the face of Mickey when he'd been told to stop playing with a favourite toy. It was an expression characterized by the words How Dare You.

The Pastor didn't even need to speak or click his fingers for the agony to begin. Sean's every muscle spasmed from crown to toe. He slumped off the chair, feeling the chipped stone crash into his ribs. He was almost certain he had lost a tooth. But mere toothache was nothing compared to the incredible, thermonuclear satanic pain currently pouring through him.

He hunched himself over on the marble, pulling the weapon from his robe unseen by the Pastor, trying to work the cocking lever with hands spasmodic with electric current, trying hard to find the safety catch, trying even harder not to touch the trigger. He would only get one shot -

And then, abruptly, the pain ceased.

He came up holding the pistol.

The Pastor smiled at him indulgently.

"You know", he said, "that doesn't work."

"Been into your own future recently?" said Sean.

He saw the doubt cross the Pastor's face like a shadow. It never had time to be translated into action. Sean loosed off three rounds directly into his own chest, aiming for the heart with surprising accuracy; then, in case the Pastor had had extra hearts installed elsewhere, he shot himself in other less obviously fatal places.

The Pastor fell. The marble side of the pool hit the back of his head like a hammer coming down on a melon. Sean fired again at point blank range, blasting the hated head apart until a bloody star of bone and flesh spatter marred the clean surface of the poolside. Eventually, his finger came down on nothing; the trigger merely clicked. He threw the gun away.

***

Committee men were already dropping out of the air around him.

"No", said Sean to the corpse he'd created, "you told yourself you'd never come back out of the future to give yourself orders. Because you remembered how shit that felt when you did it to me."

The Committee men were distraught. They had no instructions to cope with the situation. It must be like this, thought Sean, when the queen of an anthill dies.

"You must", said one of them, a young, clean shaven European whose crisp white uniform undoubtedly hid a musculature trained to snap would-be Pastoral assassins in two, "you must stay here, Pastor."

"I", announced Sean, "am beginning to sober up. This will not do."

He struggled to his feet, reached into the other pocket of his robe, drew out the absinthe bottle. It was still half full. Every hit of it, after all, was mostly sugar water. It was not intended to be swilled down neat.

"In the morning", he said in a whimper against the kick alcohol and thujone had given his vocal tract, "I intend to remember none of this, so we don't have much time. Get me Bram Hamed, now."

Even as the functionary nodded, Bram Hamed stepped out of a swirl of colour behind him. I have only to think things into being. Best think only good things, and think them fast.

Hamed did not lower his gaze to the wreckage of the Pastor's body, but held it decorously aloft. Despite the fact that Sean was almost certainly several levels lower than himself, he was still waiting to be given orders.

"I have done", said Sean, "a very bad thing."

Hamed nodded as the functionary shrieked hysterically into a communicator behind him. "I know. He is informing me."

"You know you cannot kill me", said Sean, clambering back into his wicker chair with difficulty. Words swam in his head like elusive fish, too quick to be grasped by hand. He had to concentrate.

Hamed nodded.

"If you can still take orders from me, let my last order be this. You are to carry out the project to alter the human genome as planned, with one important exception. Only the alpha component is to be deployed. You understand me? Only the alpha. Only the component that removes turannone and helotone production. All stocks of the beta component are to be destroyed. You understand? Man must have free will to do good or, or bad."

Hamed nodded.

"You are to take charge of this yourself", said Sean. "You will also implement the voting terminal system. Whatever mistakes you make from now on, you'll make yourselves. No man shall ever again set himself up as another man's leader.

Hamed nodded respectfully. "It shall be done as you command, Pastor."

Sean looked sharply at Hamed. "I don't trust any other man to do this, Bram. You are Abel Hamed's son, and Adam Hamed's grandson. Any lesser man would use the power to make himself an emperor." He smaned. "Me, for instance."

"You were trapped by causality, Pastor."

Sean smiled. The room was spinning like a zoetrope. "You understand a whole lot more than I have ever given you credit for, Bram. Now listen carefully. The biodiversity projects that insane son of a bitch was planning. Do them. All of them. No flood, mind you, only the rainbow. Only the rainbow. Only, only make sure", he said, hunched forward in his chair, forcing the words out with difficulty, "that there are lemurs in Madagascar. Shitloads of the little furry fuckers."

"It will be done, Pastor."

"Cut your hand and dip it in my blood, Bram. Then have my body destroyed. You will need to be Pastor for the time remaining, the last Pastor. I'm counting on you. I need badly to puke now. Can you help me to a toilet, possibly?"

"It has been my life's pleasure to serve you, Pastor."

Hamed looked up sharply at the assembled domestics. They scurried away.

The dark closed over Sean. As it did so, a crumpled US-Government-Letter-sized scrap of paper fell from his fingers. The paper, unfolding to the light, read:

SHOOT ME. MOTHER KNOWS BEST.