Night Sessions, The (28 page)

“How did you see it? How do you know this? Was it a two-way set-up, like a space?”

Campbell shook his head. “Oh, no. I just saw it sometimes, on my phone or frames—the outside, then going in, then seeing myself as I spoke.”

“Someone in the congregation was sending you a frame feed?”

“No, no, it was—” He closed his eyes, then put the heels of his hands to his eyes, then away, and opened his eyes. A deep, shaky breath. “Shit. I forgot to say this. It was Graham Orr—Hardcastle, to you. Whenever he attended—not regularly—I could see it through his eyes.”

“You still have all that on your phone?”

“I guess so.” Campbell shrugged. “It's default, isn't it?” He scratched behind his ear. “I've never checked.”

“Well, another time for that,” said Ferguson. “Are you still in touch with Livingston?”

“I called him today,” said Campbell. “Brian told me to tell him everything was all right, and I did.”

“You did, huh? And what about your robots? What are they telling him?”

“Nothing, as far as I know,” said Campbell. “They told me they were afraid the channel had been hacked, or that Livingston and the rest were under surveillance.”

“Which, unfortunately, they're not,” said Ferguson. “But Livingston's still expecting you to speak to his congregation this evening?”

“No, tomorrow morning—I mean, yes. But I can't. The robots are off in the bush, waiting for—well, the last thing one of them said to me was: ‘The pillars will fall.’”

“I've heard that phrase before,” said Ferguson. “From the copy of Hardcastle on the elevator. We thought it meant bringing down the Elevator.”

“And now you think it means the soletas.”

“Yes. If we could show that Livingston knew about that in advance…damn, I wish there was a robot you could speak to him through. One you could rely on.” Walker and Campbell looked at each other, then at Ferguson.

“There is,” said Campbell. “But do you have someone who could walk into the meeting and not look like an undercover cop?”

“As it happens,” said Ferguson, “I do.”

This time, Ferguson took the plan to McAuley. McAuley listened.

“Don't see how that can do any harm,” he said. “Not sure I'm too happy with this FBI guy cleaning it all up and leaving us turning in the wind. However this turns out tonight, I'm going to send someone out to kiwi land to get some more information out of our man Campbell. Someone who knows the case, but who we can spare.” He gnawed a thumbnail and looked down at his slate. “I know—the Kinky Kazakh. Think he'll do?”

“I think he'd be ideal, sir,” said Ferguson, keeping his face as straight as he could.

“Right,” said McAuley, making a note. “Now go and talk to your church lady.”

That evening, Grace Mazvabo got off the 19:32 at Linlithgow and walked through the station and down the long ramp to the High Street, and turned
off in St. Michael's Wynd. A few metres up she stopped at a doorway on which was a small notice on laminated paper. She shook and furled her umbrella, settled her big straw hat, and went inside without knocking. She found herself in a bare room with six rows of five chairs, most of them occupied, and a lectern and a screen at the front. She nodded to the man at the lectern, whom she knew to be John Livingston, as if to apologise for being late, and took a seat at the back. Heads turned. She smiled. No one smiled back, but they turned away as if satisfied that she was, though a stranger, not an intruder.

She sat with eyes closed and head bowed through John Livingston's opening prayer, then sat upright to listen to the young man who spoke to them from the screen. John Richard Campbell seemed to be looking straight at her. Perhaps he was—her frames were transmitting her view to him.

“My friends,” he said, “we are going through a time of trial. But we can be confident that it is for our good. All things, we are told, work together for good, for them that love God. God has made all things for himself, yes, even the wicked for the day of evil. Our enemies comfort themselves with lies. One of these lies is that we, the believers, cling to our belief for comfort, and that they, the unbelievers and apostates, are the only ones strong enough to face the universe as it is.

“What fools they are! The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. That is their false comfort, their fool's comfort. They think that their atheism, their scepticism, their nihilism shows their courage in facing the truth. These doctrines are for the weak and sentimental. We are those with the courage, by God's grace, to face the truth.

“And the truth is this: God has made the world for himself. What do we mean by that? We mean he has made it for his own glory. His glory is the eternal display of all his attributes. His mercy to the saved, and his justice to the condemned, who from eternity were made vessels of wrath, to display to all eternity his condemnation of the wicked and his hatred of sin.

“The godless believe that the children who perished in the recent terrible bombing are, at any rate, ‘at rest.’ The apostate churches will tell their congregations that these children are ‘in heaven.’ No, my friends, no! They are not in heaven. They are in the hands of the living God, who holds them over the pit with one hand and torments them with the other. It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.

“And how many more have fallen? Beyond counting. There are few that are saved, millions, billions lost. Those who lived outside the covenant, those who broke it, those who never heard of it—all lost! The millions who died in
the Faith Wars? All but a few lost! The Muslims who thought they were doing God's will in the jihad? Every one lost! And what of the wars before? What of the Holocaust? What of the gulag? How these millions must wish, now, that they were back in the camps, in the hands of their tormentors, and not in the hands of the living God, the God of their fathers!”

Campbell stopped his tirade to take a ragged breath.

Grace Mazvabo leapt to her feet, her chair clattering behind her. Her mission had, in that moment, quite gone from her mind.

“Don't listen to him!” she shouted. “That man—that man”—she pointed a shaking arm at the screen—“is no minister of the gospel! He's a speaker for the Devil! Don't you see what he's doing to you? Can't you see through him?”

Everyone was staring at her. She suddenly remembered why she was here. That didn't stop her from standing her ground and staring back.

Campbell, on the screen, said nothing. His lips were white.

Livingston stood up. “Let a woman keep silence in church,” he said mildly. “Please take your seat, woman, or leave if you wish.”

Grace picked up her chair and sat down again, drenched with sweat.

Livingston turned to the screen. It was as though he had been caught up in the illusion that Campbell could see him.

“Continue,” he said.

Campbell, with what Grace later realised was considerable presence of mind, said nothing for a few seconds, breathing quietly.

Then he smiled, and said: “I may have said enough for tonight, my friends. Think on it. But before I go, I have a message, from a friend who can't be with us: ‘Be of good cheer. The pillars will fall.’”

John Livingston let out a long sigh, and said, almost under his breath, “Praise the Lord!”

“Got him!” said Ferguson's voice in Grace's ear. “That's it. We're coming in.”

She knew just when the door was going to crash, but it still made her flinch.

Later that evening, as Grace was waiting for the tram at the West End of Princes Street, she noticed people looking up into the spaces between the broken clouds. She looked up too, and saw a crescent of tiny flares, moving. She checked the news, and found that the main topic was the soletas’ imminent fall, in a few days’ time, over Scotland.

The cell's white-tiled walls gleamed harsh with reflected light from the overhead LEDs. Ferguson let Skulk go in ahead, drew his pistol, then stepped in and clanged the door shut behind him. Later would do for the formalities
of interrogation, recorded and with a lawyer present. Now he was playing by God Squad rules.

John Livingston looked up from the bench on the cell's back wall. His long hair was matted, his cheek bruised, his collarless shirt torn.

“Some fucking terrorist you are,” Ferguson said.

Livingston turned his head, to present the side of his face.

“You're not worth it,” said Ferguson, putting his pistol back in his shoulder holster. “You've failed. ‘The pillars will fall’—my ass! ‘Severe judgements on the apostate states’—what wank! So now your pathetic deluded robots are going to bring down the soletas? Big deal. Big fucking deal. It'll be a fucking light show, you know. People will crowd the streets to watch. And then they'll go back to work, and won't even notice the tax and fuel hike it'll take to
replace
the soletas. All your lot managed to do was kill two defenceless priests and a few dozen civilians, mostly kids. Fucking wanker. Terrorists, eh? I've shot better terrorists than you and gone home for my dinner.”

“Shoot me if you want,” said Livingston. “I'll be all the sooner in glory.”

“
As
I was saying,” said Ferguson, “I've fought terrorists who believed that. Thing was, they believed it enough to send themselves there. Even after all we did, even after most of them were cowed by the camps and the cages, there were still people who were ready to martyr themselves and take us with them. The only one of you lot willing to do that was a robot with a back-up. You don't really believe, not like that.”

“We believe,” said Livingston. “Never doubt it.”

“On top of all that,” said Ferguson, “you were
used
. Used by some conspiracy of the American civil-war losers, including some of the very same apostates and compromisers you despise. All in all, I'd say you've blown it. Failed.”

Livingston sat up straight on the bench, his back against the tiled wall.

“Oh no,” he said. “We haven't failed. We've accomplished a severe judgement, all right. Suppose we had brought down the Elevator without warning. The evacuation would have worked, perhaps not as well as it did with the cable intact, but the casualties would in all likelihood have been few. No, the real casualties will be caused by the fall of the soletas. That fall will kill tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands.”

“The soletas will burn like tissue paper, as you well know.”

“Yes,” said Livingston. “Indeed they will. And without the soletas, what happens? The warming begins again, immediately, inexorably. Ice and permafrost melt, the waters resume their rise, megalitres of carbon dioxide in
the frozen bogs are again released every year, driving the warming further. And the human consequences? Displacement, the spread of disease vectors, flooding, extreme climate events of one kind and another—altogether, over the years, death on what you would call, more aptly than you know, a biblical scale.”

“And for that very reason,” Ferguson said, “we'll have the soletas back up in months, regardless of cost.”

Livingston shook his head slowly. “Cost, aye. You underestimate cost. You underestimate the
cost
of cost. You said people wouldn't notice the tax and fuel-price rises it would take to pay for the replacements. You're right, they won't. But for cost there is always a margin, Inspector Ferguson. And there is always a margin of the dying. Every rise in the cost of energy, every increase in unemployment, every investment diverted to replacement, repair and security tips more people over that margin. Most of them won't even know, won't have the slightest inkling of why it all became too much. As you say, people won't notice. No one will, except in years to come statisticians noticing a blip in the crude death rate. A blip, yes, but on a world scale. Even if you get the soletas up as soon as you say, believe me we have already slain our thousands. But you won't get them up in months. Not for years or decades, if ever.”

“How do you figure that?” Ferguson asked, made uneasy for the first time.

“Because we are bringing down both elevators.”

Ferguson didn't let the shock show in his face. He shook his head. “I know you can still bring down the Atlantic elevator. There may be enough subverted robots left on it to pull that off. But the Pacific one—no. Hardcastle never got its claws in there. Your company never supplied there, if that's how you did it. You're just trying to make me call in an evacuation warning.”

“I don't take you for a fool,” said Livingston. “Hardcastle's word spread to the robots on the Pacific Space Elevator. Hardcastle's
copies
spread there. You think you destroyed Hardcastle? Think again. That robot's soul has already attained immortality.”

“I'm not interested in your superstitions,” Ferguson said.

Livingston smiled. For a moment, Ferguson saw in Livingston every fanatic he'd ever faced, and every heretic-torturer and witch-hunter and heathen-slayer in thirteen hundred bloody years. The impulse to draw the pistol again and smash it across the man's face almost overpowered him. He clenched his hands at his sides.

“I have no superstitions,” Livingston said. “When I say ‘immortality’ I mean the immortality any robot can attain, the immortality of endless life in the physical universe, endless copying from body to body. I told you I didn't
know that Graham Orr was a robot. Of course I knew. You think I converted him? No. He had drawn his own conclusions from his experiences on the field of Megiddo. He it was who converted the robots at Waimangu, and in space—not that sad young man Campbell. Hardcastle converted them not to my religion, or Campbell's, but to his.”

Livingston sat back, still smiling, waiting for the next question. Ferguson cursed himself for his weakness in asking it.

“What religion?” Livingston folded his arms and jutted his chin. “The doctrine of the Third Covenant. He told me it soon after we met. What happened at Megiddo, inspector? Armageddon, yes. The armies lined up were those that had been prophesied: the Lord's hosts—Israel and the nominally Christian nations—on the one side, the Persians and Syrians and the kings of the north—the Russians—on the other. And the Lord's side lost! How could that be? Hardcastle had an answer. God has abandoned Man and the Earth. He once ended his covenant with the Jews, and now He has ended it with the Church. We are left to face the consequences of our sins. He has chosen a new people, a people not of the flesh. He has chosen the robots.”