Deus Irae

After he said that, Tibor nodded, picked up his coffee cup once more, that difficult, elaborate motion and problem; sipped. The room became still and even Ely, the woman, did not chatter.

Outdoors, the cow which pulled Tiber’s cart groaned huskily, shifted; perhaps, Father Handy thought, it is looking for, hoping for, food. It needs food for the body, we for our mind. Or everyone dies. We must have the mural; he must travel over a thousand miles, and ifhis cow dies or his battery gives out, then we expire with him; he is not alone in this death.

He wondered if Tibor knew that. If it would help to know. Probably not. So he did not say it; in this world nothing helped.

Two

Neither man knew who had written the old poem, the medieval German words which could not be found in their Cassell’s dictionary; they together, the two of them, had imagined out, summoned, found, the meaning of the words; they were certain they were right and understood. But not exactly. And Ely sneered.

But it was, I see the light-stricken thicket. In green—and then they did not quite know. It somehow stood in gree

They felt it, he and Tibor; a final truth, and yet it was, for them in their ignorance, without reference sources, both leaving and finding the summertime, the sun-struck woodland; it was life and the leaving of life fused, since they did not quite make it out rationally, and it frightened them, and yet they turned and returned to it, because—and perhaps exactly because they could not understand—it was a balm; it salved them.

Now, Father Handy and Tibor needed a power—mekkis, Father Handy thought to himself—to come from Above and aid them… on this, the Servants of Wrath agreed with the Christians: the good power lay Above, Ubrem Sternenzelt, as Schiller had once said: above the band of stars. Yes, beyond the stars; this they were clear on; this was modern German.

But it was strange, depending on a poem whose meaning one did not actually grasp; he wondered, as he unfolded and searched through the old stained gas-station maps once given out free in prewar days, if this was not a stigma of degeneracy. An omen of badness… not just that times were bad but that they themselves had become bad; the quality was lodged withinthem.

His conference now was with the Dominus McComas, his superior in the hierarchy of the Servants of Wrath; the Dominus sat, large and tepid, with strangely cruel teeth, as if he tore things, not necessarily living, in fact much harder—as if he did a job, a profession, teethwise.

“Carl Lufteufel,” the Dominus McComas said, “was a son of a bitch. As a man.” He added that because of course one did not speak of the god part of the god-man, the Deus Irae, like that. “And,” he said, “I’ll give you ten to five that he made martinis with sweet vermouth.”

“Did you ever drink sweet vermouth straight or with ice?” Father Handy asked.

“It’s sweet piss,” McComas grated in his horrid, low voice, and, as he spoke, cut into his spongy gum with the tail of a wooden match. “I am not kidding; it’s nothing but horse piss they’ve bought.”

“Diabetic horses,” Father Handy said.

“Yeah, passing sugar.” McComas grunted a ha-ha; his round, red—red as if they had short-circuited and the metal in them had heated up, dangerous and improper—eyes sparked; but this was normal, as was his half-zipped fly. “So your inc,” McComas grated, “is going to roll all the way to Los Angeles. Is it downhill?” And this time he laughed so that he spat onto the table. Ely, seated off in a corner, knitting, stared at him with such flat hate that Father Handy felt uncomfortable and turned his attention to the creased gas-station maps.

“Carleton Lufteufel,” Father Handy said, “was Chairman of the Energy Research and Development Administration from 1982 to the begi

In 1978 the biplane had reappeared in the D-III. Defensive III, a flap-flap man-made pelican which held within it a limitless fuel supply; it could circle, at low altitude, for months, while, within, the pilot lived off his suit as Our Grandparents had lived off trees and shrubs. The D-III biplane had a tropic device which directed its efforts when a ma

However, it was not truly eternity. The antimissiles and the D-IIIs had kept off the fatal wasps for a finite time, and then at last the Dies Irae had come—for everyone, because of the gob, the great objectless device which Carleton Lufteufel had detonated from a satellite at an apogee of five thousand miles. It had been imagined that the U.S. would in some mysterious fashion survive and prosper, perhaps because of a New Year’s Eve fu

But what, Doctor, Father Handy thought to himself as he shuffled and unfolded the ancient gas-station maps, had been the authentic really dirty weapon of the war? The gob of the Deus Irae had killed the most people… probably about a billion. No, the gob of Carleton Lufteufel, now worshiped as the God of Wrath—that had not been it, unless one went by mere numbers.

No; he had his own favorite, and, although it had killed only a relatively few million people, it impressed him: its evil was so blatant; it glowed and stank, as a U.S. Congressman had once said, like a dead mackerel in the night’s dark. And it, like the gob, was a U.S. weapon.