The Preacher Man

Eleora sighed. "You mean about the death-trigger? No, quite the opposite in fact. I was just happy to see you, that's all."

We chatted about the war for a while. Eleora had been quite alarmed when she first heard of the conditions Giza had demanded for meeting with me. I reassured her I would not deviate from our protective counter-measures. Eventually I tried to nudge the conversation back to the death triggers.

"I'm glad we waited until July 4th for Bel'dar's first pronouncements. We would have never have gotten the second quarter research reports otherwise." They had arrived on July 3rd, volumes of detailed notes on the genetic investigations.

Eleora nodded. "Indeed. This last feed proved to be diagnostic. There's general agreement here now that my initial conjecture was correct. Abdul Hadi, the world's leading geneticists are a bunch of blind men groping in the dark. They honestly don't know what they're doing."

I stared at my wife and blinked. "How is that possible? What they do works!"

"How is it possible? Abigail once told me a man named Thomas Edison invented the incandescent light, years before James Maxwell developed the field equations for light."

I thought for a moment and shook my head. "It's not the same thing."

"You're probably right. From what Abigail has learned, this Thomas Edison probably was an excellent practical engineer. The world's geneticists appear to be blind gropers. Their research is pure hit-or-miss, no theory behind their research at all."

I looked at Eleora completely perplexed. "But look at what they've done!"

She smiled back at me sweetly and laughed. "And just what have they done?"

"The modifications of the human birth ratios, the anti-aging drugs, the genetic resistance to disease, the genetic death-trigger, the eternal virginity drugs..."

"And what makes you think they truly understand how it all works?"

"Huh?"

Eleora shook her head. "Abdul Hadi, the evidence is overwhelming. Spend just a week studying their research. They know almost nothing."

"BUT?!... But their labs! I've seen them!"

"Smoke and mirrors. Oh, they can do wild things in experiments, but they have almost no control, and even less understanding."

I gasped at the implications. "Then how..."

"Yes, how indeed. Our conjecture is that all of these abilities were developed before the war. And the understanding behind the abilities did not survive the War. Or at least, the understanding did not survive the Wild Times." Eleora took a moment to sigh. "Perhaps it's just as well. They probably would have destroyed the world by now if they knew what they were doing. Or at the least, stripped the world of its goodness. Husband?"

"Yes?"

"In the thirty years before the War, that's when all these medical advances were made. The engineering techniques survived the war, in a very limited cookbook fashion. The true understanding of the genetic advances and the ability to make further progress did not."

I frowned. "But it's been eight thousand years. I've talked to Abigail too! She said the very earliest understanding of DNA occurred only about two hundred years before the War!"

"Abdul Hadi, the world's population then was a thousand times greater than it is today. In terms of research capabilities, a year before the war is a thousand years now. And the current researchers are also under tremendous restrictions."

I suddenly saw her point. "You mean not to produce religiously incorrect results?"

"Yes, of course. It's blocked even limited advancement for the last eight thousand years."

"So where does that leave us?"

"Without a solution. It's so tragic Abdul Hadi. In twenty years, if we had all the resources we needed, I think we by ourselves might be able to shut off the death trigger. But in five?! No way! There are so many proof-of-principle experiments to do. Our task is absolutely hopeless."

"I can't accept that," I said with a frown. "I won't accept that."

"Sweet husband, I know. It's not your nature to accept defeat. But we're becoming resigned to it here. We have about another two years before we begin to die. Life is still precious though, and still worth living. It's an honor and a joy for us to serve you husband. Abdul Hadi?"

"Yeah?"

"Remember, tomorrow, no deviations with the meeting with Giza. I don't trust them!"

"I promise. I don't trust them either. A bunch of fanatics..."

"... with a callous and sick fondness for death and misery. Watch yourself my love."

We chatted a few moments more and wished each other goodnight. I curled up around the back of Abigail a few minutes later. She stirred slightly and butted her rump back into me and went right back to sleep. I stayed awake for a while, breathing in the smell of Abby's soft, clean hair, my mind refusing to rest. I felt as if I were juggling eggs in the middle of a hurricane, each egg a precious human life depending on me for the catches. And the windswept rain was blinking me and my arms were beginning to tire.

Chapter 54. The Holy is Greater!

Time: August 11, 8244 9 AM

The geneticists' ramjet landed at Bandar Arenas in the early pre-dawn light at 7:07 AM, a half hour before sunrise. As per our agreement, they would be led to a secure conference that was part of my inner quarters complex. They had insisted that our first meeting be both face-to-face and secluded, attended only by myself and totally unrecorded. After considering the benefits to stopping the carnage at Giza and also that these were the top three Glorious Mufeto of the Health faction, I agreed to their demands.

Both my Guard and my security teams were deeply troubled about these arrangements, but I overruled their objections. The Guard spent a full hour making a meticulous inspection of everything the men carried before they were allowed to enter the palace. It was the best they could do, but I still saw deep frowns on their faces as they escorted my guests through the palace.

At 9 AM sharp the three Mufeto saw me enter the conference room with them. With a brief nod of my head, I sealed the door behind me and took a seat at my end of the table. Three pairs of cold eyes glared at me from the other side.

They were a formidable sight, decked out in the full glory of their ceremonial robes. CL-27 Majd was their leader, attended by CL-26 Butrus and Dirar. Their vestments were lavish, magnificent gold cloth with rich trimming of shining red stones. It made me rethink my own choice of clothes, a simple white shirt and dark pants. My only colors were my arm and breast insignias, showing the five-color pentagon of my office.

But then again, when viewed in a certain light, the opulence of the three made them look more than a bit pompous. I decided I had made the right choice for my outfit. I took a deep breath, but before I could offer an opening Prayer of welcome, Majd began to speak.

"Our agreement was that this meeting would be totally unobserved."

I nodded. "That is true."

"We insist on verifying the isolation of this room!"

I shrugged and waved my hand at him. "You may proceed."

CL-26 Dirar pulled out a sophisticated recorder scanner and placed in on the table. He fumbled with the controls for a moment, trembling and appearing very nervous. When he finally activated the device, he shouted "The Holy is Greater!" so loud that the room and my ears rang with the echo.

"The Holy is Greater!" shouted Majd and Butrus as they stood to reply, again with full volume. Again Dirar screamed, "The Holy is Greater!" and again Majd and Butrus thundered an echoing response.

"Glorious Mufeto, please," I responded. "The Holy is greater than all our deeds, I concede the point. Can we now get on with our meeting?"

After their explosive affirmations, all three of the Mufeto looked highly agitated. They stared at me and nodded and sat back down, smug smiles of satisfaction upon their faces. And there was something else there too. I studied their expressions and thought for a moment. Fatalism?

Now that the room was quiet, I noticed a faint hiss coming from Dirar's scanner. It was an uncharacteristic noise for such a device to make, and for a moment I wondered about the inspections that my security teams had done. Had they missed something? After a few more seconds the hissing stopped.

My guests and I stared at each other for a long, awkward moment. "Well," I said finally, "are you satisfied the room is secure?"

"It appears to be so," Dirar mumbled as he worked the controls on his device. After a moment he looked up to his cohorts. "Yes, the room is unobserved."

I wasn't surprised by his finding. The technology behind our polarized holo-scanning was based on physics totally unknown outside of Australia. This meeting was being observed and recorded in meticulous detail there. Our scanners here at the palace were completely undetectable by Dirar's device.

"I'm very glad to hear it," smiled Majd at Dirar. Majd then turned to me. "Abdul Hadi, Servant of the Guide and 85th Cunif Califar, your humble servants are before you!" Was that a sneer on his face and a hint of mockery in his voice? The expressions were not overt, but still...

"Humble?" I replied with a chuckle. "I must say I hadn't noticed."

"Oh, we are indeed humble before the Holy," replied Butrus with a nervous laugh.

I frowned. "Glorious Mufeto, please. Why are we talking like this? Did you truly come here to negotiate a hudna, or just to play word games with me?"

"No, not to play word games Abdul Hadi," replied Majd. "And what is truth? A matter of perspective, don't you think?"

"Majd?" I replied, as I shook my head in confusion. "No, not at all. Is not the truth the truth? We can recognize the truth by its endurance, and its ability to interlock with itself. And if one Prays to the Holy with honestly and humility, the Holy's truth is not that difficult to find."

"You are a dreamer Abdul Hadi!" shouted Majd. "A dreamer with only a few moments to awake and realize his truth is gone!"

I leaned back in my chair and sighed. "You didn't come here to negotiate at all, did you?"

"Ah," chortled Butrus. "The dreamer awakens!"

I gave the CL-26 a grim smile. "It's a skill I was taught as a boy, to sleep with my eyes half open. And I was not unaware of the hissing of your device."

"An elegant weapon, don't you think?" said Butrus, continuing with his smile. "The agent will decompose into harmless compounds in minutes, leaving no trace of its power."

"And you didn't try to flee Abdul Hadi?" asked Dirar. "That was foolish! Not that it would have made a difference. The agent needs only a few seconds to disperse." He coughed. "Completely unknown in modern times, very ancient." He coughed again. "By the end of our affirmations to The Holy, you were already a dead man." Another hacking cough. "We all were."

I shook my head sadly. "I'm not going to die Dirar, at least not today I Pray." I looked at my guests. In addition to his coughing, Dirar was beginning to look very sick, and the other two were sweating profusely in the cool room. I sighed. "I'm surprised you didn't immunize yourselves beforehand."

Majd shook his head. "There is no cure, no antidote. This is a martyrdom operation."

"Indeed?" I replied. "Pity."

"Oh? You don't wish our company in death?"

I shook my head. "No, not that. It's just a pity that I suspect you'll be dead before I can have you meet my inquisition councils. Tell me Glorious Mufeto, how long will you live?"

Majd shrugged. "A few moments more... Already I feel my heartbeat racing, becoming erratic. Feeling sick yet Abdul Hadi, how's your own heart? Don't you fear death?"

"Me? Oh, I'm fine. And I was taught as a boy not to fear death."

Majd looked profoundly puzzled for a second and then shook his head. "A bluff! I don't detect nose filters, and they would be of no help if you had them."

I nodded and continued. "Tell me Majd, before you expire, what would it take for me to end the war with the Health faction? You control the only source of the world's anti-aging drugs. I freely admit we have to find a compromise." I looked at my opponents closely. Their skin was very flush, and all three now looked as if they were having critical difficulty catching their breaths. I realized they had only moments to live.

"There will be no compromise!" Majd hissed. He glanced at the clock. "This very hour Babylon and Tobruk will burn in our righteous fire! And with you dead, the world will have no choice but to accept us again as their masters!"

I looked in alarm at the three Mufeto, not for their health but because of their words. What was Majd talking about?!

"You would attack the sacred monasteries?!" I thundered, and then a shock of realization hit me. "Faisal!" I roared. "Faisal, a good man, and my good friend! You killed him, didn't you? You murdered him with this drug!"

Butrus gave a weak laugh through his cough. "Just a touch, just enough to stop his heart. Speed was not required then."

"Weak!" gasped Majd. "The man was weak and in our way. As you are in our way! Faisal was blind!" Another cough wracked his body, but he fought to continue. "Blind and weak with compassion! And you are an imposter! Blasphemer! Deceiver! Corrupter of The Code!"

Actually, his last points were accurate. But this was no time to let him score them. "You're wrong Majd! Faisal was indeed compassionate, but compassion is a strength, not a weakness! And your other charges are nonsense! Bel'dar pronouncements were certified as genuine! The system is infallible! And the preaching of my coming is a thousand years old! You fool! How do you think I managed that?!"

"We..." Majd wheezed and gasped. "We don't know."

I stood up and thundered, "Do I appear to be dying to you?!"

"What... No... What? How?" All three of the men began to shake uncontrollably. Dirar had been closest to the device and was the first to vomit.

Majd was desperately trying to hold onto his life and not succeeding. "How?" he managed to whisper between coughs. "It's not possible..." Then he too began to vomit.

I felt briefly ashamed of deceiving three men at their dying moment, but my cause justified it. I suddenly realized I had my own points to score, not points of truth and justice but points of deceit and cheap advantage. But I still took them.

I bellowed, "Do you think your regicide agent is mightier than the Holy?! No! The Holy is Greater Majd! You said it yourself! And Bel'dar has spoken! Five miracles have been promised to me, and this is the first! My enemies fall before me while I remain untouched!"

"NOOOooooo....!" wailed Majd, whose body then went into violent vomiting that quickly evolved into convulsions. The other two tried to rise to help him, but they never made it out of their chairs. For a moment projectile vomiting of bile and then blood filled the room. The violence of the convulsions destroyed their bodies, rupturing the valves on their hearts and their bladders and ejecting the shit from their colons through great implosive compressions of their abdominal muscles. Within a minute I was standing in a room with three dead men, the floor and the chairs and the table covered with their excrements.

I could easily imagine the stench. There were smears of bile and urine and feces everywhere, even on the walls. The fineries of their rich clothes were now completely obscured. The only clean area appeared to be my own clothes, which seemed miraculously free of the filth. I gazed for a second in sadness at my pure white shirt. And despite my imagination, I of course smelled nothing.

Oh, my dear friend Faisal I thought. A person with a kind heart, and in spite of his centuries of experience, he had never seen this coming. He deserved so much better. I gave a sharp hand signal to cut the holographic scanning, and then in an identical room fifty meters distant, pushed a button that ended my holographic projection into the death chamber.

7.5 hours later...

Time: August 11, 8244 4:46 PM

"What?! All of them?! Go back and verify! And don't report back until you personally confirm the status!"

"At once Abdul Hadi!" the militia Commander replied, and with a quick salute the hologram ended.

I sank back in my chair in the war room and glanced at my Councilors. They all looked as shocked as I felt.

I glanced at the clock and was surprised to see how late it was. The sun had already set at the capital. But Giza, even though more than nine degrees to the east, still had another hour of daylight left. At least daylight wouldn't be an issue for the troops. Most would not be carrying night-vision goggles.

What an incredibly awful day, I thought. The civil war reached its critical phase shortly after 9 AM, when I holovised my meeting with the three Health Mufeto to the world. I then announced to my war cabinet that I would immediately seize the anti-aging production facilities at Giza. Simultaneously there were two major attacks by Health in South America, targeting Beldar's vault at Babylon and the Nikahaldi Academy at Tobruk. Thousands of Health loyalists sprang from hiding and tried to overrun the two facilities.

We were barely successful in saving the Academy at Tobruk, and barely unsuccessful in saving the vault at Babylon. Through tremendous bravery, my outnumbered militia repelled the primary wave attacking the vault, but failed to stop a small martyrdom team that managed to make it inside. They apparently had the encryption keys needed to enter. Minutes later the entire complex erupted in a tremendous explosion killing everyone nearby.

The few surviving troops at Babylon think the vault must have already been primed for the explosion. The martyrdom team could not have been carrying anything large enough to penetrate the hundreds of meters of rock and steel shielding the inner core and power source. My Commanders on the ground speculate that the Health faction and the monks must have had a secret alliance, one that would have allowed Health to destroy the vault at a time of their choosing. There seems no other possible explanation.

The afternoon revolved around the critical battle at Giza. Seizing the cathedral complex at the southwestern end of the island proved to be no problem, but the geneticists made a fanatical last-stand at their priceless production facility in the northern interior of the island, at a mountain site with the ancient name of Mt. St. Catherine. There on the small island 700 meters above sea-level, my troops were engaged in a desperate battle to save the world.

My Commander returned with his report. "Personally verified, Abdul Hadi. The battle is over. All the geneticists are dead. But all three of their primary production facilities are completely gutted, engulfed in flames. The two additional emergency facilities have also been sabotaged, massive detonations as our troops began to enter."

The man looked at me with a tear in his eye. "Total destruction Abdul Hadi, there is nothing left to save. I think the war is over, but we have failed you, and our failure is complete."

I nodded numbly, forgetting even to salute as I dismissed my Commander. After a moment I looked around the war room. The room was silent, and it was the silence of the tomb.

"No anti-aging drugs..." whispered Jibran by my side. "None at all..."

The result was our worst nightmare. All the adults and all the children passed their second gate, and that included all children as young as in their thirteenth year, would die in 8245 from anti-aging drug withdrawal. Men, women, boys, girls, myself, my wives, we all now shared a swift and horrible fate. I was in a state of utter shock and despair. I closed my eyes and bowed my head and begged my Holy for forgiveness for my failure.

Chapter 55. The Breaking of the Dawn

Three months later...

Time: November 11, 8244 4:24 AM