Heaven (22 page)

The querist twirled his olfactory organ as if in apology. “Because sometimes what you call butchery
is
necessary. A true healer learns to accept it. The treatment begins with gentle reason. If the patient does not respond, the
healer will try stronger medicine. What alternative is there when all else has failed? When a lifesoul is in danger and
it is your sacred burden to save it
?” The Veenseffer-co-Fropt was becoming agitated now. “It has taken me much lifesoul-searching to understand the implications
of that stupendous duty! It is the cusp of logic upon which any healer is forever impaled.” Becoming ever more articulate
as the power of advocacy surged through his mind, the querist completed his eloquent appeal: “Then, Samuel, when all other
avenues have been closed,
then
you must take the awesome responsibility of making a decision: that another being’s spiritual health must take precedence
over your own misgivings.
You must turn away from the path of spiritual cowardice, Samuel!
I chose not to neglect my friend, but to take
whatever
action was needed to save him—however repellent I personally found it.”

Sam opened his mouth, but for a moment no words came out. “Uh . . . master, your words make sense, but your reasoning is flawed.
What if you are wrong
?”

“That,” said the querist, “is the terrible beauty of the logic. Because I might indeed be wrong in my interpretation of the
Great Memes, it follows that every day I am risking my
own
lifesoul for the benefit of others. And there can be no greater love than that, do you not see?” The instructor’s voice was
urgent, brimming with emotion. “There is no flaw. Remember what Huff Elder taught the Originals, Samuel. Remember her fifth
conversation.
The body is nothing, compared to the lifesoul
. Was she wrong?”

Sam’s confusion increased. Suddenly, the well-recited phrase was taking on a new and terrible meaning. Yet the new meaning
was entirely consistent with everything he had been taught.

“Well . . . yes. Of course. Huff Elder’s writings have always been the foundation of the Church.”

The instructor pressed home his advantage. “And what of the two Great Memes? Have you witnessed anything today that is inconsistent
with either?”

Reluctantly Sam found himself saying “No.” For there
was
nothing that contradicted the Great Memes. The Church as a whole was more important than any individual. And the spiritual
completeness of the individual was more important than the individual’s physical comfort.

“The temporary suffering of one lost lifesoul,” the instructor said, “is as nothing by comparison with the propagation of
the Great Memes. Even the pain of an entire culture counts for nothing, if that culture does not embrace the One. A culture
that does not experience the joy of Unity is no more than a tedious multiplication of individual lifesouls.

“As we speak, our mission comes ever closer to the infidel world of No-Moon, with its unconstrained diversity of beliefs and
actions. In your new role, you will be in the forefront of the conversion, not confined to a duplicator cubby on a tiny ship.
You will then be called upon to face far more distressing scenes than the one you witnessed today. To help you prepare for
the role that awaits you, I shall tell you about another mission, recently completed, and an outstanding success. There, the
Church was forced to sacrifice an entire group of sentient beings. In physical form, they were akin to birds . . .”

The veiled strangers seized the Huphun broodmother, chained her to prevent her from flying away, and dragged her from her
home on Spittle Nest Cliff. GreenCheckeredCircle screeched her protests, trembling with fear, anger, but above all, incomprehension.

The nameless invaders transported her to the plains above the cliff, one of the myriad flat-topped plateaus into which the
landmasses of the Huphun homeworld were divided like crazed pottery. From there she was taken by transpod to Brooding Canyon,
where the neighboring species of Hophuun lived. And there, still in chains, she was brought before her feud-sister, the nestmaker
SquareBlueSpotted, for a lesson in spiritual enlightenment.

Traditionally, there was little love lost between the Huphun and the Hophuun. Their feud had lasted 211,000 starsets so far,
with only the occasional lull. Yet now her feud-sister was professing sympathy for the broodmother’s desperate plight, even
as the silent strangers stood, their faces shrouded in strange cloths.

Something was terribly wrong.

So desperate was GreenCheckeredCircle to end her flock’s misery that she forced herself to ignore this feeling. In the lilting
tones of trucespeak she began to explain to her deadly enemy the wickedness that was being inflicted on her fellow Huphun.
“Why?”
she sang at last, almost breaking down with released emotion. “Why have these creatures treated us so?”

Her feud-sister, the Hophuun nestmaker, fluttered her own unrestrained wings in a show of superiority. “Because they know
of the Huphun’s long-standing intolerance of harmony.”

“Nonsense! The Huphun are tolerant of all who follow the permitted path.”

The nestmaker cackled. “And your hatred and enmity for those who do not adhere to your small-minded, narrow path is legendary.
Notwithstanding that such folk form the majority.”

“The unbelievers are wrong,” said GreenCheckeredCircle. “Such matters are not subject to vote. It is the Huphun alone who
possess the True Knowledge—”

“
Kreeech!
Always you Huphun seek to impose your insane obsession with the Wings of the World! With you there is no other topic of songversation!
Despite all counterarguments, you are convinced that you alone possess the true knowledge, and you insist on imposing it on
every cliff-dwelling of this planet instead of attending to your own.”

The broodmother weathered the verbal assault without flinching. “That is your belief,” she sang. “Like all infidel opinions,
it is wrong. But you say that we Huphun are being persecuted for our commitment to the Permitted Path. Why should strangers
be aware of our ways?”

“Because we have told them,” replied SquareBlueSpotted. “As have the Hoofen, the Hoffynn, the Who’fun, the Hof-phoon, the
Hüfen, the Huff—”

“You list infidels.”

“To the Huphun,
all
other flocks are infidel! You complain of persecution, but it is
you
who have persecuted
every other flock on this world
!” The nestmaker calmed herself. “And whenever an opportunity presented itself, you have imposed your will on them.”

“You would do the same, given an opportunity. You merely lack our skill in combat.”

“We have rejected the old ways of racialism and guerilla war. We have converted to the Chreech”—here the nestmaker had trouble
wrapping her larynges around the foreign term—“the
Church
of the United Cosmos.”

It sounded like the Huphun had opposition.

“We now subscribe to the Memeplex of Universal Tolerance, which preaches love for all of our fellow creatures, here and throughout
the Galaxy,” the nestmaker finished.

GreenCheckeredCircle, sagging under the weight of her chains, glared at her social counterpart and sworn enemy. “The invaders
have glued my breeders to the cliffs so that their children fall and perish. That is
love
?”

SquareBlueSpotted fluttered her quills to show how serious she would be. “Love so great,” she trilled, “that it risks its
own spiritual health to save the lifesoul of the disbeliever.”

The Huphun broodmother was baffled. “I know not of what you speak.”

SquareBlueSpotted acknowledged the truth of this statement with a low, mournful crooning sound. “That is the tragedy of the
Huphun,” she agreed. “From the moment the missionaries arrived, your flock was identified as a certain source of resistance.
That is why your treatment has been so severe.”

GreenCheckeredCircle, who was not stupid, saw an entry. “But we were denied any chance to obey! We have been prejudged, before
any of us lifted a feather! Let us, too, convert to your Church. Let us enjoy the benefits of this . . . memeplex.”

SquareBlueSpotted soughed like the little-winter wind. “If only that were possible, feud-sister. But we know that you will
never truly
believe
. That is why your flock has been selected—as an object lesson. The missionaries of Cosmic Unity have calculated that for
every Huphun that dies, twenty members of other flocks will experience the joy of the Lifesoul-Cherisher. The balance of love
is tilted against you.”

GreenCheckeredCircle did a little dance of frustration and deposited a small heap of excrement to show her contempt. “That
is unfair.”

“So was the Huphun reign of terror that led to your selection for this honor,” replied SquareBlueSpotted. “Your own intolerance
has rebounded upon you like a resurgence of rakis mites in a poorly cleaned nesting site.”

“We have rights!” screeched the broodmother. “Under feud-treaty!”

“You do not accord rights to others, and so you forfeit your own,” replied the nestmaker. “In any case, feud-treaty is now
obsolete.”

“We will fight this evil,” sang GreenCheckeredCircle. “The Huphun will never surrender to these unbelievers! We will
never
convert to a heathen religion!”

For the first time, one of the veiled strangers spoke. Its accent was poor—its translator was not yet trained in the Huphun
larynge. But its words were clear enough: “That option is not on offer.”

Sam absorbed the terrible lesson of the Huphun. At the cost of just one minority group—a group of troublemakers, at that—an
entire world had been brought into the fold of the Church. Such a small price to pay for so wondrous an outcome.

One thing he did understand now: The querists truly believed that their actions were motivated entirely by love. He had always
been taught that it might sometimes be necessary to sacrifice a sentient’s comfort for its overall well-being. To administer
vile-tasting medicine to cure a disease. And he had learned to appreciate the spartan surroundings of the monastery of equals,
whose purpose was similar. What he had not asked himself until now was how far the principle extended.
Did it have limits
?

Suddenly, he understood the querists’ position: The answer to that question must also be no. To them, Huff Elder’s principle
was absolute. It had to be, or else the Church stood for nothing. A sentient entity’s lifesoul was valuable beyond price,
whereas its physical comfort was mere currency.

He didn’t yet believe that, but he was wavering under the force of the logic. He had been trained since childhood to accept
whatever the priests told him. This was a test of his faith, and his doubt made him fear he was failing that test. He resolved
to put his doubt behind him and to try to control his emotions better.

Hesitantly he expressed this view.

“You progress,” said the querist, beginning to relax. “You have begun a difficult transition. I believe that you now understand
intellectually
that the foundational memeplexes cannot be denied. My task is now to reinforce that new understanding until you cease to
question it. Do you see the necessity for the next step?”

In Sam’s mind the horror was taking on a new aspect. Emotionally he was still fighting against what he had been told, what
he had seen . . . but the querist’s conviction of righteousness blazed like a sun. Sometimes you had to be cruel to be kind.
. . . The cruelty had been more extreme than he had ever imagined possible, but the cause was so overwhelmingly vital—not
just to the Church but to the individual! Clutch-the-Moon’s tragedy was that his heresy had become so deeply entrenched in
his sick mind that only radical surgery could excise it—and, for reasons that were no fault of the Church, the patient had
been too physically weak to survive the treatment. His end had been a mercy, but only on the physical level. On the spiritual
level, it was a tragedy without end.

Sam vowed to pray every evening in Clutch-the-Moon’s memory. He could not save the blimp’s lifesoul now that he was dead,
but prayer would help Sam to come to terms with the loss. And reinforce an important lesson.

Now he felt ashamed at his naive reaction. As always, his master was right; once again he, XIV Samuel, had been mistaken.
He should have focused his thoughts on the spirit, not on the body.

But even as he reaffirmed his determination to obey the Church in all things, Sam was terribly afraid that his newfound conviction
might slip away again.

The three querists shared a common interest outside their ecclesiastical duties: relaxing conversation after a difficult day.
Their custom was to meet in the Rhemnolid’s quarters, where the environment was a compromise that the others could easily
manage without elaborate equipment.

To its two friends, the !t! looked distinctly out of sorts. It must have had a tiresome time. It wasn’t hard for them to coax
the !t! into telling them why.

“There was a terrible disagreement,” it said, its frenzied clickings instantly transformed into two varieties of speech. “Two
monks, both blimps. The argument became very personal and abusive. I had to intervene and reprimand them.”

The Veenseffer-co-Fropt felt immediate sympathy. Dissent was so emotionally draining. “What was the dispute about?”

“It was a sexual matter. You know that in several species within the Church, death of a partner is an integral part of the
sex act. One monk was maintaining that sex must be forbidden to such species in Heaven, since the purpose of Heaven is to
postpone the onset of death. The other would have none of it, stating that in Heaven
nothing
could be denied. Neither monk displayed the virtue of tolerance, I regret.”

The Rhemnolid saw the irony. “But in Heaven this cannot be an isssue. All things are possible, even if they sseem logically
contradictory.”

“Yes, but these were simple folk,” the !t! stated, confirming the obvious. “Strong on faith, short on reasoning power. But
I do indeed feel drained.” And with that, it helped itself to a jolt of electricity from a portable stimulator that the Rhemnolid
had installed specifically for that purpose. He liked to offer his guests proper hospitality.