History Lesson

Chapter 5 of Signature.

Signature

Chapter Five

History Lesson

When the butts were situated and the tumblers all tall, Mack buffed his palms and turned to Amantu. “Now for the main event. This is especially for you, Hammer. But even if Solomon’s data comes off as incredible, I think it’s safe to say we’ll all agree that the experience is worth our full and erudite attention.”

Abel’s eyes gleamed. “And I think it’s safe to say we expected nothing less.”

“Solo,” said Mack. “Samuel Obadiah Butcher. The Republican Convention of 2116. Still Motion.”

The skin immediately reconfigured. The men were now standing in an apparent chamber of four right-angled apparent walls ninety feet apart: Mack’s roomy observatory had become a packed auditorium. A thousand black-robed, black-brimmed statues were crammed inside this huge teak-and-mahogany image of a room, each one mesmerized by a gaunt, fierce-eyed elderly man behind a cruciform podium on a backlit stage.

“Sam Butcher,” Mack said evenly. “The Republican Party’s man of the hour. He was raised in a famous evangelical family, ‘The Barnstorming Butchers’, as I recall. Born entertainer, stand-up orator, and multimillionaire at forty. As patriarch of a bay-to-cape web of Faith Families, he attacked the Americas’ moral decay with venom and resolve.”

“Ven-ge…” Izzy sputtered. “I…evenny…what? Clarify, man! Even-who-ical?”

“Evangelical. Back-formation of the word ‘angel’, meant to signify a supernatural agent of the pre-Colony divinity. Evangelists were the forerunners of our modern snatchers. But this was way before telepresence. The evangelism of Butcher’s day was a perfectly legal system that promoted the tenets of a globally-accepted supreme being’s teaching; a teaching that was complete with aggressive campaigning and ritualistic behavior.”

Abel slapped his knees. “Oh, please.”

“Now wait a minute, AJ. These people were sincere. What’s more, they were really desperate. There’d been a deep schism in the machinery of democracy for forty years, with liberals and conservatives leaning ever farther from the middle; the left wing becoming the Hard Left and the right wing the Hard Right, the former growing deliberately dirtier in retaliation to the vaunted spotlessness of the latter. Our political system was in civil war. And with the election nearing, fully half the population were ready to fight to the death for Mister Butcher here, while the other half remained rowdily impassioned over their candidate. Solo. Harry Riser. Two hours later. Still Motion.”

The black-garbed statues dissolved like men of foam. In their place arose an equal number of men and women, all outrageously coiffed and costumed. Many were nearly naked, wearing only scraps of flesh-tone underwear strung with bizarrely dyed feathers and lewdly shaped baubles. By their posture it was evident they’d been captured in a highly suggestive dance. Up onstage, a chubby beaming man posed like a gaudy gift to humanity.

“Harry Riser was a gadabout, a publicity hound and, well, quite frankly, a flaming homosexual. He represented a popular interpretation of the Constitution that equates liberty with license--as though the meaning of a free society is getting away with all you can. There’s no doubt that under any other circumstances he and his hedonistic circus would have been laughed into obscurity, but the Hard Right represented something that, to freemen everywhere, was even more unpalatable: the utter annihilation of that hard-won liberty. A week before the election the consensus was plain: the Left was going to win in a landslide. Sam Butcher was shouted down and threatened, his speeches parodied and his platform ridiculed. At the close of the campaign he was all but impotent.”

Izzy considered the crowd through his glass, his head rocking left and right. “But…Gad, man! Was no--middle ground?”

“None. The pendulum had swung too far. Now skip a beat. Mysterious rumors surface alleging improprieties between Riser and a retarded boy; a boy whose mother boasted a red-letter reputation with congressmen and various welfare personnel. Although this woman is reported receiving a million dollars from unnamed sources before evaporating from public view, it’s already too late for Riser. A kind of tribal rage against child molestation takes the mind of man and media. Rider is berated, hounded, assaulted, placed under full Secret Service protection.

“The Butcher camp leap on the moment like piranha. Sam’s eleventh-hour slogan trembles on every lip: ‘Cop or con, man or child; no one likes a pedophile!’ Riser is consigned to the bowels of history. Solo. Harry Riser. Two days Forward. Real Time.”

An instant later the men were outdoors. All those dancing statues had been replaced by a wildly screaming mob of frenetic projections, blowing in and out of focus as they ran. Fists passed through Abel’s and Amantu’s gaping faces while Izzy scrambled under nonexistent feet. The din-and-flurry was so realistic it all but obscured a phalanx of riot police fighting to escort a haunted-looking Riser to safety.

“Solo. Break.” Mack clasped his hands behind his back and absently watched his guests recover. “Butcher did win the presidency, but less by electoral college than by acclamation. As things turned out, we’d all have been a lot better off if they’d just stuck with Riser.

“Now, Sam was a born showman with a tremendous ego. His speeches became sermons, his Oval Office objections became outright chastisements. He turned the highest office on the planet into his personal pulpit. This was too much for the Senate and House.

“Butcher was impeached, found mad, and removed unto the wailing bereavement of over a billion ‘Little Butchers’.

“His Vice bailed out right behind him. The interim rule of the House Speaker was so deliberately neutral the man was nicknamed the ‘Plain Vanilla President’.

“Butcher began wandering across the country, preaching from the stage of a motorized sound system. Solo. The ‘Soul Tsunami’. Overhead Zoom. Real Time.”

The skin’s phantom horizon gave way to hills crawling with people. The Group again received the distinct impression of observing from on high, though their feet remained in direct contact with Mack’s floor. The big difference between this scene and Solomon’s Black Death rendition was the level of activity--the mob ‘below’ was beyond belief; blue hills black with millions of followers, all crammed about the tiny creeping dot that was the rolling stage bearing Samuel Obadiah Butcher. The Group could hear him hollering over a powerful public address system; of repentance and remittance, of demons slain in virtuous battle.

“Sam knew how to hold a crowd; he used repetition to keep them in a trance-like state. This was one of the oldest tricks in the evangelical book. Listen to how he uses a simple sing-song phrase, ‘Oh Soul’, to control pheromonal output and blood pressure. Solo. Locate a Tsunami Chant. Enhance the Butcher audio file.”

The scene shifted to late afternoon. Now Butcher’s voice came through with exceptional clarity, while the mass responses of the crowd sounded as though on a separate track.

“Oh Soul of the burning night!”

“Oh Soul!”

“Oh Soul of the deepest sea!”

“Oh Soul!”

“Oh Soul, do we, cry un-to thee!”

“Oh Soul! Oh Soul! Oh Soul!”

Mack was noting his friends’ puzzled expressions while the chant progressed. “Solo. Stop.” The mob froze, though its rhythm and passion still filled the room. “A ‘soul’,” Mack explained, “was a supposed entity, non-corporeal, that departed a cadaver to join the waiting divinity in its otherworldly domain. It was essentially one’s consciousness, freed from the unclean body for purification in an ‘afterlife’. A neat trick if you can pull it off: mental immortality. As expressed in Tsunami philosophy, ‘soul of’ meant the deity itself; kind of a universal entelechy.”

Abel laughed appropriately, but Amantu mused, “Rather like a signature, albeit one infused with self-will.”

Mack kneaded his chin. “Y’know, Hammer, you’re a funny guy. A dynamic signature!” He winked at Abel. “Anyway, to stir up this kind of feeling was to waken a potentially wild animal, one that could go into stampede-mode at the drop of a hat. So from their earliest barnstorming days the Butchers had kept an ensemble of bodyguards; as much family as employees. By the time of the Tsunami, Sam was abundantly aware of his own mortality. Solo. Zoom in on Security. Real Time.” Solomon instantly magnified a bare ring surrounding the slowly proceeding stage. Within this ring were hundreds of burly men, stepping back and forth, turning on their toes while staring into the crowd with looks of exaggerated menace. Security wore black shovel hats, very dark sunglasses, plush sable-lined parkas, black paratrooper pants, black combat boots. Each sloping hat bore a slender white cross emblazoned on its crown. Continuing this theme were bolo ties designed to resemble long white dangling crucifixes over black rayon dress shirts. Whenever these men turned, and they turned often, similar bone-white crosses could be seen running down the backs of their parkas; the vertical beams corresponding to spines, the horizontals to outstretched arms. “Mark well those men. They, and their descendants, play a pivotal role in the fun to come.

“Everywhere Butcher paused, this astounding entourage halted with him. Whole cities erupted on these sites, bearing strange names like Davidtown, Miracle House, Jericho Junction. Some still exist. That entourage included media of every level and every caliber, National Guardsmen and special agents, sympathizers and camp followers, the dysfunctional and the dispossessed. And, thanks to those media, the details of his movements spread like wildfire. Finally Butcher, claiming to be directed by a voice on high, staked his claim very near here in what was once known as the state of Kentucky, now the Colony-proper’s dead-center. He named this area New Nazareth, and it became a magnet for millions upon millions of citizens from every coast. There was no way on earth to take care of sanitation in such a situation. A hardy breed of field rat came out of the hills and ran rampant in the garbage and half-buried fecal matter. Sexually-transmitted diseases went unchecked. The place began to look more like a battlefield than a mass celebration, and soon death walked boldly among the faithful. The Guard and Crosses worked heroically, the rats were fought with cleavers and gate wire, but in the end it was Butcher’s charisma that held everybody together. The worse it got, the more they saw Sam as their savior. These were some odd times. In all major cities, his supporters erected supply lines, darkened the windows of their houses, and walked around dressed entirely in black, making no secret of their allegiance. At the same time, perfectly stable citizens were quitting their jobs and selling their homes, packing up their families and joyously crossing the country to support the Tsunami. Solo. Break.” The lights came up.

“Gentlemen, this was no fad or public caprice. So far as the government was concerned, the Soul Tsunami’s mass migration was tantamount to anarchy.” Mack stabbed a forefinger in the air to make his points. “Minimally, its effects were a staggered economy, a breakdown of basic law and order, and a dramatic increase in civil polarization.

“The Hard Left’s abiding resentment over Riser’s foiling, and their burning hatred of the Little Butchers’ haughty divinity-worship, grew into a cult, the cult into a movement, and the movement into a crusade. There were some despicable beatings of those black-draped followers, right in public. Their children were ostracized, their wives ridiculed and sexually assaulted. Then in 2118, on a special divinity-holiday known as ‘Christmas’, a coast-to-coast coalition of university students, goaded by rage, pharmaceuticals, and peer pressure, introduced a digital virus into every municipal mainframe. This virus, the so-called ‘Messiah Bug’, instantly deleted every reference to religion. The divinity worshipers’ overpowering word of history and law, a two thousand year-old tome known as ‘Bible’, was wiped from the annals of history in a heartbeat.

“My friends, it’s impossible to overstate the effect this single act had upon millions and millions of human beings. Beyond outrage, beyond violation, beyond imagination--the record of all they believed and prized… gone! After an interim of shock the faithful went berserk, attacking anyone in uniform. They felt that the system, and that technology itself, were somehow to blame--that the government, having transferred all hard copy into a digital format, was directly responsible for the complete loss of their profound teaching. All over the continent, appliances in general, and digital devices in particular, were attacked with great vengeance. Fueled by religious sermons on every street corner, mobs dressed entirely in black stormed archives and governmental offices, smashing to pieces all equipment responsible for data storage and manipulation…for filtration, for power, for sewage. Officials--even minor bureaucrats--were torn limb from limb, buildings were burned to the ground. In their frenzy the faithful destroyed the foundation of their very survival.

“When word of the tome’s deletion reached New Nazareth, the Little Butchers went through various stages of denial and hysteria before breaking down completely. Butcher himself collapsed as though struck by lightning. Once recovered, he claimed to have undergone some kind of subliminal interview with the divinity, who told him that prayer must not be a meek mumbling but a ‘begging outcry’. And ‘prayer’, in this context, means a vocal attempt to attract a busy divinity’s attention. So the heart of New Nazareth bleated out its plaint, and the fringes joined in. The urgency went out in waves, until it seemed that every North American voice was involved. Throats were screamed bloody raw, women swooned, elderly men died in their passion.

“Then, one night not long after, a divine vision appeared in New Nazareth for a period of just over eleven seconds before vanishing altogether. But it was enough to convince the Little Butchers that Sam was their ‘New Messiah’, which meant he was, practically speaking, in the divine line, essentially a second son of the divinity itself. Butcher thereupon wandered off in a trance, his path cleared by hundreds of thousands of scrabbling men and women. With millions more hard on his heels, he staggered up to Crystal Cave, the mouth of a vast underground caverns system, known, pre-Colony, as Mammoth. Standing in a sea of jabbering humanity, Sam informed a breathless world by video that his deity had ordered him to produce a new divine literature in their beloved old, centuries-tested hard copy, complete with an updated set of laws and admonitions. This work-of-works was to be known as the New Faith, and its word was to be absolute, with Sam’s interpretation final. Additionally he, Samuel Obadiah Butcher, had been divinely-directed to select a body of assistants. Solo. Crystal Cave. Mark. Zoom out. Still Motion.”

From an apparent rise some two hundred yards off the Mammoth entrance, the Group watched Butcher standing in a pose of beatific submission, his arms thrown high. So sensitive to human viewpoint was Solomon that the contemporary observers were aligned in perfect juxtaposition with the proximate projections, as opposed to those seemingly smaller figures in the “distance”. At this magnification there were already thousands upon thousands of men and women squeezed about the Group, their eyes and hands raised passionately.

“Zoom Out times ten.” The breadth of vantage increased tenfold, showing countless ever-tinier people cascading to the cave’s mouth, now a black pinprick in the hills.

“Times one hundred.” At this point the Group were staring from high upon a relief map, yet still swallowed up by raving humanity. Butcher and his new inner circle were but mist. “You see what I mean? This is the effect religion had on people. Solo. Zoom in. Slow Clock at Mark.”

The perspective rocketed back to Mark, whereupon the imagery moved along at a retarded rate. Butcher was turning in slow motion, a thousand men and women in his wake. The women were all very comely, the men strapping and intimidating. The mouth of Crystal Cave, really an antechamber to the staggering Mammoth Caverns system, was blockaded by Butcher’s security. Their uniform had evolved to meet the leader’s heady status. The men now wore hooded black leather trench coats with elongated white crosses on the arms, fronts, and backs. Black leather gloves, heavily studded black belts, black steel-toed boots. The same huge shades covered their eyes, and the same white crosses showed on the fronts of their hoods, but now white paint representing vertical crossbeams ran down the faces, foreheads-to-throats, and, in like fashion representing horizontal crossbeams, across the mouths to the ears.

“Solo. Break. These people accompanying Butcher were to be his personal attendants while he undertook the awesome task of dictating the divinity’s mighty word. He led them into a dark and dangerous world, courageously calling out platitudes to an unseen deity, his arms encumbered by a pair of blank flat stones. The rats followed them down.

“Conditions were deplorable. Unfettered by the regulations of civilization, the baser aspects of human nature quickly took hold. The caverns became savage cloistered arenas, and Sam little more than a cartoonish father figure. Torches contributed a fearsome ambiance, injuries went untreated, sickness and claustrophobia brought many to the brink of insanity. At the entrance, Security assured the anxious multitude that everything downstairs was just dandy, and stomped the daylights out of anybody who got too curious. Food came down in a fairly steady stream, but the scraps were thrown into miscellaneous passages to rot, and any old hole served for a toilet. As the diseases of antiquity reemerged, the dying were left screaming in the dark. The rats grew bolder. In time a cult of the rat grew, blending almost seamlessly with the ancient religious tenets Butcher had been trying so hard to preserve. Even though he was grandstanding bravely, everybody knew he was scared out of his wits. He realized he’d have to resurface eventually, and knew, too, that when he did he’d better have something pretty damned impressive to show the impatient millions. What he didn’t know is that blind fate will always trump blind faith.”