The Gods Look Down (16 page)

‘Who says?' Phinehas jeered.

‘I'm the eldest son and the eldest son becomes High Priest,' Hophni maintained stubbornly.

‘It hasn't been decided yet.'

‘It doesn't have to be decided, it's the law.'

‘The law says that the High Priest must choose his successor and so far he hasn't chosen.'

‘I have chosen.' Eli's blank eyes gazed placidly into the hazy distance. He raised his right hand and placed it on Uzza's shoulder.

‘No,' Phinehas said, shaking his head. His colour had risen. ‘That can't be. I won't allow it.
We
won't allow it—'

‘What you will or won't allow doesn't matter.' Eli's voice was very calm. They would have to know and this was as good a time as any. ‘When I am dead, Uzza will be the High Priest in my place. This has been decided these many months past and during this time Uzza has received instruction in the holy rites of the temple. There is nothing either you, Phinehas, or you,
Hophni, can do to alter the course of history which shall be written in the annals of our Tribe.'

‘You think not, old man?' Phinehas said. He turned and pointed at the emissary. ‘There is the history of our Tribe, there in front of you, if you had eyes to see. It doesn't matter one fig whether or not Uzza becomes High Priest because his term of office will be brief and inglorious. Once the emissary brings word to Dagon of your foolish obstinacy over that – that—' he stuttered with black rage ‘—that thing you hold sacred, the history of the Tribe will be written in blood. And you will be to blame, old man, with your stupidity and religious dogma and your blind faith in a pile of useless old junk.'

Eli held the young man's shoulder in a firm grip. ‘Now I know I have chosen wisely. From this day I will not speak of you as my sons. It will be recorded in our history that Eli, High Priest of the city of Shiloh, died without issue.'

‘You will die sure enough,' Phinehas said. ‘Our history will record that before too long. The god Dagon will see to that!'

‘How do you know it isn't Dagon who hasn't long to live?' Uzza said. ‘With all his armed might he cannot overcome the power of the Ark of God.'

‘
Power?
' Phinehas said. ‘What power?' He turned to the emissary. ‘Don't be taken in by this talk. He hopes to frighten you with superstitious nonsense; the Ark resides in the silent inner chamber, hidden away from the people, because Eli knows it to be a false idol. He uses it to scare everyone.' He snorted. ‘It hasn't the power to scare a pariah dog.'

‘I've never seen it do anything.' Hophni added. ‘Not a thing.' He pulled at his meaty fingers, cracking the joints.

Uzza stepped down and said, ‘We should give the emissary something of importance to report to his lord and master.'

‘I forbid this,' Eli said, reaching out his hands. ‘The Ark is not a plaything. It shouldn't be used to frighten fools and unbelievers.'

‘You told me once that it was a wise man who knows the extent of his own ignorance.' Uzza's voice was very cold and menacing. ‘I hope to make the emissary wise and through him the god Dagon. Our guest should return with a story worth telling.'

‘But the danger …' Eli said.

Phinehas looked around him. He sensed the uneasiness and said blusteringly, ‘The old man talks like a child. Let the emissary see the Ark; it will mean less to him than it does to us.' He looked at his brother and tried to smile.

But when the emissary saw the Ark he halted abruptly and stared at it, his breathing a hoarse rustle in the tube which connected his mouth to his chest. He leered up at it sideways, his misshapen head held at an angle.

Phinehas said, ‘Don't be afraid of the light, it comes from within the sphere. It can't harm you.'

Uzza led the High Priest to the steps which went up to the catafalque on which the Ark rested and together they knelt and bowed their heads, their lips moving in silent prayer. Above them the Ark gave out its steady unremitting glow, lighting up the walls of the silent inner chamber which had been hewn out of the lava-rock. The high domed roof still bore the marks of the implements used by workmen of past generations, and all around the chamber, in niches hollowed out of the rock, elaborate objects of gold and silver and precious crystal gleamed in the bland unchanging light.

The emissary recorded all this. He noted each detail of the chamber, the sacred objects in their recesses, the rich heavy drapes deadening all sound; and he looked closely at the Ark itself, raised up on its platform, the glowing sphere like a huge skull and below it the pipes of burnished brass coming from this place to that, that place to the other. There were too, he saw, strange symbols on the flat part, pressed into the body of the Ark, which to him were meaningless. He was bewildered by it all, unable to comprehend its purpose, and the source of illumination was the most perplexing thing of all: no flame, no fire, no smoke – only pure steady light.

Hophni clicked his tongue and said, ‘You see how they worship the thing, as though it was a god itself. But it never moves,' he told the emissary, ‘never speaks, gives no sign at all.' He turned away, stamping his feet in irritation.

The emissary said, ‘I have never seen anthing like this holy object of yours. Where did it come from?'

‘It appeared to us in the desert one day,' Phinehas said. ‘Out of the blue.' He laughed openly. ‘So the Scriptures tell us. But your guess is as good as mine.'

‘I have no guess. It is unworldly.'

Uzza and the High Priest had risen. The old man turned his empty eyes on the others and held his arms high above his head. ‘Behold the Ark of God! It has watched over us for centuries and even now will deliver us from our enemies. Is it not a wondrous sight, emissary of Dagon? Will you tell your lord and master all you have seen in the temple at Shiloh?'

‘As your sons say, High Priest, it neither moves nor speaks nor makes a sign. It is fearsome and strange enough to frighten children but not grown men. The god Dagon could smite it down with a single blow.' His broad slanting brow formed a bony prominence so that his eye-sockets were hidden by the shadow it cast. His features were made unreadable by their grotesque disproportion.

‘“By their unbelief shall ye know them”,' Uzza quoted softly. He was smiling radiantly. He took Eli's hand and pressed it between his own, holding it for a moment, then deftly mounted the steps of the catafalque, and the High Priest immediately called out to him:

‘Do not approach the Ark. I forbid it! Uzza, hear my command and obey, I beg you!'

Phinehas said, ‘This is a cheap trick even for you, old man. You think the emissary of Dagon will be taken in by this charade?'

Eli's arms were outstretched in supplication; his feet fumbled uselessly to locate the step. ‘Don't let him approach the Ark – Hophni, Phinehas – I beg you to stop him!' He stumbled and fell full-length on the steps, still reaching out with hands the colour of old wax.

‘Take no notice,' Phinehas said to the emissary. ‘They have practised this deception in the hope that it will impress you. In all the years since I was first brought to the temple the Ark has remained the same, exactly as you see it now. It's quite harmless, I'd stake my life on it.'

Even as he was speaking Uzza had climbed to the uppermost level where the Ark rested, supported and held upright by three short struts which came out at an angle from the main body. The young man stood before it, the light from the sphere shining down on his head, and then reaching up on tiptoe, put out his hand. The two sons of Eli and the emissary of Dagon saw a
sliver of light, like the finest strand of pure silver; it appeared at the tip of Uzza's outstretched hand and seemed to connect him to the Ark and at once his entire body was illuminated as from within and the glow became so fierce that they had to shield their eyes from its blinding brilliance.

Eli too – even in near blindness – had been able to distinguish the intense light and he uttered a cry of anguish and pain; and then the glow faded so that his sight was dim once more and he could not see (as could the others) the standing figure of dark grey which crumbled and sagged, a body dissolving into dust.

*

The upper sphere of the Ark shone steadfastly in the silent inner chamber. In the shadowed recesses the sacred objects reflected their gleams of gold and silver, as still and silent as the source which illuminated them. Its presence was eternal, indifferent to time and the fortunes of men.

Eli knelt before the catafalque, his hands clasped tightly together, alone in sightless prayer. He was praying not for deliverance but for understanding. He did not think to question the wisdom of God, nor His mysterious ways, but he felt that his life had been wasted in ignorance if he did not finally understand why a good man should perish by the hand of the Lord when other men, of evil intent, were spared His wrath and holy retribution. Throughout his long life he had kept good faith, overcoming all doubt, believing that the final judgment would favour the meek, the just, and all those who strove to live peaceably with their fellow men. The world had seemed to deny this creed, to fling it back in his face, and yet he clung stubbornly to his belief in the sure knowledge that God would ultimately punish the wrongdoer and reward the man of true faith.

How could he now explain – not to others but to himself – the injustice and futility of the young man's death? Uzza had sacrificed himself to demonstrate the power of the Ark to the enemies of the Tribe, but surely it wasn't necessary for him to die? Wasn't it enough that he was prepared to give up his life to save the lives of others? God could not be so callous. Why should a man of faith be taken away when the earth teemed with evil and wickedness, when false gods sought to spread
their corrupt rule and even now were planning to invade the city of Shiloh and sack the temple and carry off its most holy symbol?

He looked to where he knew the Ark was stationed and prayed for a sign. It was written in the Scriptures, from the time of Kish onwards, that whenever the Tribe was threatened or in jeopardy they had received a sign from heaven which had revived and strengthened their faith in the Lord God. Now, if ever, was such a time. If they were to defeat the Dagonites and prevent the desecration of the Ark, Eli, as leader of his people, required an act of affirmation from its Maker. In his heart, though he dared not think of it, it was to be atonement for the death of Uzza. Without a sign Eli doubted whether he had sufficient faith to sustain him in the deliverance of his people: more than anything he wanted to believe, to have his faith restored, but in effect he was making a bargain with God—

Show me the way, make me strong again, and I will serve you with all my heart and soul.

But first God had to give him a sign.

As with most of Johann Karve's intuitive insights – he had a success rate of sixty per cent and over – this particular one solved the mystery of the Biblical machine with annoying ease. Queghan couldn't understand why no one, especially Dr Francis Dagon, hadn't thought of it before. The cyberthetic print-out, when it appeared, contained a complete technical specification along with blueprint, operating and maintenance instructions, descriptions of the likely power source, raw material input and average daily output; in fact almost everything they needed to know with the exception of the identity of the intelligence which had designed and built the machine in the first place.

When extended the print-out measured 5.3 metres in length and Queghan was lost in admiration for the ingenuity of the transcriber, Dagon ben Shem Tov, who had been able to write out the specification for a protein fermentation plant from nothing more than an oral tradition handed down through centuries. It was an incredible feat of scholarship, for not only had he included every detail of construction but also the operating instructions: ‘On the Sabbath a trance falls upon microprosopus' – which when processed cyberthetically came out as: ‘Every seventh day in continuous cycle the unit ceases to function automatically for the purpose of maintenance. It is taken to pieces, cleaned, reassembled and put on-stream for the next six days.'

There were some areas where the text was open to differing interpretations and here the cyberthetic system had extrapolated the known data and made what could best be described as an educated guess. The heat source, for example, being beyond the semantic grasp of a primitive people lacking a technological background, had been described thus: ‘Macroprosopus
(upper skull) has four eyes, one of which is self-luminous … and below this the subtle air is whirled about from side to side, and the subtle fire is whirled about from side to side.' From such scant information it wasn't possible to deduce with absolute certainty what the heat source comprised or how it functioned, but by taking the known features of the unit – refrigerated water condenser, heat exchanger, irradiation chamber – the cyberthetic system had narrowed down the options until it arrived at the conclusion that the source was most likely to be a form of high intensity, high frequency light – in other words, laser optics.

So what was the machine's purpose? Here was the most startling revelation of all and one that the mythographer still hadn't fully taken in: using a single beam of optically pure light to irradiate a bacterial culture the unit was capable of producing a balance of protein, carbohydrate and fat which was fed through a series of pipes (to allow an exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide) and then drawn off into a lower vessel where it was heated and dried and passed into two smaller vessels for collection. The end product of this complex fermentation process was described in the print-out as ‘Single-cell protein possibly based on Chlorella type algae'. The unit could make 1.5 cubic metres a day – enough to provide sustenance for several thousand people over an indefinite period of time. Nutritional analysis had shown that the basic essentials of a healthy diet were all there in the balanced constituents of protein, carbohydrate and fat, and that it was possible to vary the food value by altering the conditions of growth of the bacterial strain.