Madame Rat

Chapter 6 of Signature.

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Chapter Six

Madame Rat

“By now Sam was well into his eighties. His joints were wracked, his bowels shot, his mind going. But he was, after all, a man. The women he brought down with him were selected for their sexual attractiveness, as well as for their pliability. And he was a very, very scared little man. The males he’d picked were the biggest and dumbest he could find. Sam was counting on their loyalty, but in due course progressive senility made him clinically paranoid; afraid of his circle, afraid of the dark, afraid of his own security men. And, more than anything, deathly afraid of the next showing of his deity. Solo. The Honeycomb Heart. Still Motion.”

The observatory’s interior became a deep stone vault lit by standing torches, their eerie peaked flames frozen in space and time. On a rock stage stacked with rat skulls sat a decrepit, weary Sam Butcher, the picture of profound depression, surrounded by black-robed men holding black-leaved manuscripts with black-dyed covers made of human parchment. Behind these men, soot-painted nude women could be seen in apparent pantomime, their arms thrown out and their heads tossed back. The scene in front of that stage was a paused full-blown orgy; naked men and women flung on the dirt floor, their glistening flesh smeared with fresh soot. Others were chained to the walls or heaped semiconscious on the stage. Caught in the act of wading through all these bodies were Butcher’s security men, whips and prods in their beefy gloved fists. Their black cloaks had evolved to meet the circumstances; they were now full-length hooded affairs with elastic bands that kept the faces prominent, and featured bone-white crosses down the chests, backs, and limbs. That white facial paint had expanded to cover the entire face, making Security’s visages, with those ominous dark glasses now like eye sockets, uncannily similar to death’s heads.

“Here the New Messiah held court, haunted by demons and doubts and the natural afflictions of the aged. And here he handed down the edicts he claimed were set forth by the divinity, while his conspiring circle of disciples--that somber group of barefooted men standing round him in the black hooded cloaks--entered his ravings in the secret ink of urine on the Black Book’s leaves, freely mistranslating as they went along. Those brawny men with the prods and lashes are the elite remnants of his old security team, the infamous ‘Butcher’s Butchers’, seen here engaged in their holy work and favorite pastime: torturing those made demented by religious fervor. These guys’ predecessors were recruited from prize fighters and heavyweight wrestlers; even in his early post-barnstorming days Butcher was fearful enough to require a measure of viciousness in his protection. When he reached icon-status he had to turn over the job of hiring to team members themselves, and they engaged in recruitment tactics that were all-out contests of strength and violence. Underground competitions--fights to the death--were initially held for the New Messiah’s sake, then as gory entertainments to gratify the Butchers’ own egos and sick tribal impulses. Solo. Real Time.”

The women began to dance and writhe. The torches’ flicking umbrae slid across their painted curves. Security plucked up random souls and punched them back down, engrossed by a strangely methodical form of brutality.

“At this point it was still important to keep up an imperious front. Butcher took his pest hole’s loveliest crawler for queen; a petite, pallid, manipulative brunette temptress he pet-named ‘Little Mother,’ but who was known by the inmates as Black Mary. To please her, and to justify their intimacy, he had her written into the New Faith as his divinely-graced personal bodyguard. Then, when things got hotter, he proclaimed her the divinity’s chosen executioner. Little Mary took to her task with zeal, using rat fangs as stilettos. This is the origin of all those legends about a plague passer, the underground’s notorious ‘Infector Mater.’

“Butcher fell wildly in love with this little porcelain pervert; demented as she was, demented as they all were. And I say ‘pervert’ because the woman was a flat-out masochist, as well as a sadist. She could take as much punishment as she dished out--the one thing she couldn’t take was sentiment. Sam could only gratify her with beatings, which were never quite ferocious enough. The circle were into it, Security were all thumbs-up; the ambiance was one hundred percent encouragement. Somewhere in there he lost it completely. Butcher had his little rat-queen nailed to a cross on the divinity-channeling stage. There’s a real symbolism to this act, which I’ll show you guys in a minute. The people took to torturing Mary ritualistically, egged-on by her ecstatic screams. The Honeycomb rapidly evolved into a bloody madhouse.

“When Sam couldn’t stand it any longer he took the only out open to him--he went into convulsions, claimed a revelation, and jabbered his way back to the surface. In front of the whole hemisphere he announced that the divinity had commanded him to lead the world in a Final Crusade. Solo. The Upcoming. Still Motion.”

And they were back outside, on what must have been a very cold, very dark night. Hundreds of generator-operated searchlights stood trained on Crystal Cave, painting one patch of the skin a brilliant white without increasing the room’s illuminative content a whit. Butcher was crouching amongst countless prostrated black-clothed followers, his arms wrapped round his torso. It didn’t require sound and motion to illustrate the mob’s wracked passion: the faces around the Group were maniacally contorted.

“According to the New Messiah, ‘God’ had declared war on the ‘Devil’; the former being his omniscient personal bodyguard, the latter being pretty much everything that didn’t conform to the niceties of Western religion. All technology was to be destroyed, along with everybody not of Butcher’s ‘Divine Phalanx’. A cushy immortality would come to those who died in righteous battle, eternal damnation to anyone who hesitated. Butcher first commanded that the permanent National Guard encampments around New Nazareth be attacked by his hastily-organized Faith Catapult; really just a mad dash of shrieking followers wielding any weapons they could jerry-rig. Incredulous troops were slaughtered in the frenzy, and many thousands of Butcher’s Catapult mortally injured in the stampede.

“The military’s retaliation was swift and panicky. Units of the Army and Air Force cut the faithful down in their tracks, causing an hysterical three-day mass exodus into the bowels of Mammoth.” He inclined his head and said, “Solo.”

And they were caught in a riot. The observatory was filled with bright daylight, the air clotted by confused voices, the artificial horizon made fuzzy by the all-out frenzy of uncountable scrabbling followers. Flesh was scraped away by rock as men, women, and children squeezed screaming into Crystal. In the apparent distance, a few fighter jets and half a dozen attack helicopters circled for additional runs. The Group stood riveted as a pair of copters swept over the mob, spewing bullets that left pockets of humanity flopping. Amantu instinctively threw up his arms as a hammering column of lead tore through him and passed.

“Back down below,” Mack said while the slaughter raged around them, “Butcher had to fight in the dark. He was a lousy general; almost every command he gave ended in a massacre. Solo. Stop. Meanwhile survivors continued to pile in, one on top of the other. Eventually they blocked off the entrance and turned the place into a wailing asylum. These interconnecting caverns are enormous--according to Solomon over three hundred and fifty miles long, and in some spots deep beyond measure. There were myriad uncharted breaks to the outside world, flues and the like, where locals were able to set up supply lines from the cities by tunneling around troops. Many of these excavations comprise the root system of our present-day Colony.

“The Army blew the blocked entrance to grit and poured inside. Butcher’s people retreated one cavern for every lost battle, while he muttered and paced like some lunatic commander in a besieged bunker. Yet despite their New Messiah’s delirium, or maybe because of it, they continued to fight savagely, relying on ambush, a secret code based on echoes, and a selfless will to engage that awed as much as frustrated the advancing soldiers. They were driven back by an antique, gasoline-based gel called ‘napalm’. No one knew for sure if it was tunnel fever or tacit agreement--and Solomon is unable to pinpoint a direct order for me--but when the faithful were at last pressed into an unbelievably vast blind chamber, which also happened to be a natural crude basin, the troops, who were only to use their napalm as a means of prodding, turned all they had on Butcher and Company, incinerating the lot on the spot. I won’t try your stomachs with that visual. The gale of data produces a highly distorted playback anyway. Solo. The Aftermath. Zoom Out.”

New Nazareth on a dreary autumnal morn.

Files of body bags on stretchers, winding up a temporary road out of Crystal, en route to a series of makeshift hospitals separated by columns of troop transports. Helicopters hovering like dragonflies. Teams carrying out black-draped crates and litters heaped with miscellaneous items.

“All of New Nazareth was placed under quarantine. Uncounted survivors, guerrillas and the like, escaped into the hills, where they took to digging out tunnels in earnest, eventually hooking up with the supply lines and bringing in refugees from the cities. See all those boxes with the black covers? They contain cribs. Secure vaults were discovered in the depths, peopled only by nursemaids watching over infants in black swaddling cloths. Notes, written in urine on soot-coated rags, were pinned to these cloths with messages like, ‘Please let little Nehemiah walk with the Lord’, et cetera. Solo. Stop.”

The grim picture froze. Mack looked at the Group thoughtfully. “Solomon tabulated the body bags, using Fast Motion in a temporal Zoom mode. Forget exactitude: over five million, seven hundred and thirteen thousand were carried out over the course of eleven weeks; all burned beyond recognition. The troops were buried in a hush military ceremony in a place called Virginia, the infants put up for adoption on military bases. Butcher’s followers were interred in various paupers’ cemeteries around the country. It was all highly classified.

“The government was hard-pressed for an out, and admission to genocide was definitely not an option. Solo. The Messiah Commission. Still Motion.”

Seated at a broad table against the skin’s southern face were seventeen dour men in age breaks measuring middle-aged to quite elderly. At first blush they presented all the appearance of colleagues posing for a group portrait, but closer examination exposed a panel of fuming arbiters going out of their way to avoid one another.

“Take a hard look at these very exclusive gentlemen.

“The commissioners were assigned to find a single, unassailable solution that would mollify the public, exonerate the government, and permanently prevent a recurrence of disaster on this scale. Finally admitting defeat, they narrowly passed a vote to solicit the assistance of a logic program. All pertinent data were entered. The program was unable to process the illogic of faith, but it established the condition of faith as the linchpin, and demonstrated that this condition’s insane consequences were made inevitable by an ages-old mindset under the mounting pressures of a burgeoning population. The Butcher explosion was cited as merely the initial catastrophe in a projected series of social cataclysms. The only-human commissioners were forced to beg the program for a livable solution, and the program responded in the time it takes to point a cursor:

“With Biblical references already deleted from record, with Butcher and his Tsunami followers all carbonized, and with the only people still shouting hosanna quarantined under military guard, the logical step was to delete those quarantined, establish means to obviate further religious influence from outside our borders, and rewrite history--a better history; one without smiting and persecution, one teeming with sane, dispassionate heroes.

“Something more palatable to subsequent generations. When prodded, the Commission’s new digital tutor even offered up an improved version of reality. It simply removed everything related to religiosity, and left the great works of science and exploration intact.

“Yet that removal amounted, cumulatively, to thousands of years.

“The program, considering the way historical events were chronologically patterned, invented alternate causes and concerns. Prominent novelists, dramatists, and artists were commissioned to fill in the gaps, and their completed new history is pretty much the one we’ve grown up accepting as factual.

“Since the Commission refused to accept the liquidation of Butcher’s followers, the program recommended said followers remain quarantined. It thereupon invented a mysterious virological factor, what became known as the ‘Messiah Plague’, to justify an enforced isolation, projecting that, should these ‘carriers’ be allowed to die out naturally, the condition of religiosity would die out with them. In the meantime, the ‘well’ public would be told that the ‘ill’ Colonists’ religious declamations were the natural result of an insidious, but completely contained, brain fever. As stipulated by the program, the government would keep up the necessary propaganda--quashing rumors and caramelizing facts--for as long as it took. According to the culled probability curves, Butcher’s divinity would, in time, go the way of all rabble rousers.

“The vote was seventeen over naught for revision on these terms.

“Gentlemen.

“I’ve come to appreciate the Messiah Commission’s members as genuine heroes. Their regard for the betterment of our species far outweighed their personal wants. And, even though suicide was officially condemned by their deity, they’d made a pact. With the votes tallied, all seventeen sucked cyanide in a black-draped war room made up as a house of worship.

“Of course, the dying-out of Butcher’s followers didn’t solve a thing. They’d passed their beliefs onto their children, and when the youngsters grew up they smuggled in new converts from the cities. Tribes of imitators dug in across the country; our famous Burghs chapter is just one specimen, but very close to the original. The Colony and all its limbs developed underground, sequestered and provisioned by the government while it kept up the incurable disease ruse. Humans are very adaptable. But it’s a funny thing about time. The brain adjusts beautifully. After centuries of repetition fiction ‘becomes’ truth. Even today, men thought to be snatchers are shot in cold blood by perfectly sincere agents. Mothers still spook their children with stories about carriers under the bed. Drunken teenagers still sneak into the Colony with guns and razors, still tell stories about fights to the death with subterranean zombie armies. Even though the Messiah Plague was yesterday’s news four hundred years ago.

“Yet, you know, in the end that damned program was right. Men have come to favor their intellects over their passions. Our children grow up fascinated by the real rather than the imaginary. There’s room for both humor and beauty in the grand mosaic.”

Abel pushed himself to his feet. “But, Titus--humor and beauty aside, intellectual honesty prevents my accepting this notion of citizens wreaking havoc on their own civilization. Show me a campaign--show me any time in history where so many people have behaved so violently in concert.”

“You’ve got to absorb the psychological impact of this Bible-expunging thing, AJ. Imagine, as a comparison, all science wiped out, without the least vestige of evidence to show for centuries of heroic research.”

“New calculations could be made. New heroes would arise.”

Mack nodded, more to himself than to the room. “Well, there was one thing the Commission hadn’t counted on, one thing the program wasn’t able to deal with, one thing even Samuel Butcher wasn’t ready for. As a matter of fact, millions upon millions of vigilant men and women were caught completely off guard.”

“Of course they were.” Abel’s teeth glinted under the house lights. “And that would have been…because?”

“Do you remember that vision I mentioned earlier, the one that precipitated Sam’s abrupt elevation to Messiah-hood? Solo. Vision One. Real Time. Full Pan, Short Zoom. Observer’s Vantage, two-second delay.”

And they were back outdoors on a black, searchlight-shredded night, locked elbow-to-elbow in a mob that stretched as far as the skin could capture. Now an incredible din--some kind of singsong chant--was cut off mid-verse. The projections surrounding the Group jerked to the northwest, their eyes bugged-out and their jaws hanging. As though choreographed, men and women on all sides immediately and simultaneously fell to their knees. The effect went out in the motion of ripples. Within seconds, projections horizon-to-horizon were flat on their bellies, facing a skull-shaped hill two hundred apparent-yards to the Group’s left. In a hastily-cleared space atop that hill leaned a watery, free-standing shape. The figure was indisputably that of a man, as opposed to something manlike; the limbs were of human proportions and the bearing upright, though the spread arms and limp digits gave it an impression more of hanging than standing. Knees were closed, the pelvis sunken, the chin resting on the chest at a bad angle. It was a posture of complete submission to suffering, of spirit crushed, of life run out. In the area of the head could be seen spikes corresponding to rigid tufts, or perhaps to brambles or shards. The only indication of clothing was a series of lateral planes suggesting a rude cloth around the region of the loins. The phantom glowed dully in the night, so unstable it looked like it would phase out at any moment. Two seconds later it was hit by a hundred searchlight beams.

“Solo. Stop.” Standing knee-deep in groveling humanity, Mack turned to Abel and said, “Because, Josh, it sure as hell looks like old Sam delivered.”