Deus Irae

“Pete,” he said, as the other came into the camp, Toby at his heels, tail a-wag. “How was your walk?”

“Pleasant,” Pete said. “It’s a nice night.”

“I think there is a little wine left,” Schuld said. “Why don’t we all have a drink and finish it off?”

“All right. Let’s.”

He passed the bottle among them.

“The last of the wine,” he said, disposing of the empty flask over his shoulder and into the trees. “No bread left either. How long till the day when the last of you must say that, Pete? Whatever made you choose the career that you did, times being what they are?”

Pete shrugged.

“Hard to say. Obviously, it wasn’t a matter of popularity. Why does anyone choose anything and let it dominate his life? Looking for some sort of truth, I suppose, some form of beauty…”

“Don’t forget goodness,” Schuld said.

“That, too.”

“I see. Aquinas cleaned up the Greeks for you, so Plato is okay. Hell, you even baptized Aristotle’s bones, for that matter, once you found a use for his thoughts. Take away the Greek logicians and the Jewish mystics and you wouldn’t have much left.”

“We count the Passion and the Resurrection for something,” Pete said.

“Okay. I left out the Oriental mystery religions. And for that matter, the Crusades, the holy wars, the Inquisition.”

“You’ve made your point,” Pete said. “I am weary of these things and have trouble enough with the way my own mind works. You want to argue, join a debating team.

Schuld laughed.

“Yes, you are right. No offense meant, I assure you. I know your religion has troubles enough on the inside. No sense to dredging after more.”

“What do you mean?”

“To quote a great mathematician, Eric Bell, ‘All creeds tend to split into two, each of which in turn splits into two more, and so on, until after a certain finite number of generations (which can be easily calculated by logarithms) there are fewer human beings in any given region, no matter how large, than there are creeds, and further attenuations of the original dogma embodied in the first creed dilute it to a transparent gas too subtle to sustain faith in any human being, no matter how small.’ In other words, you are falling apart on your own. Every little settlement across the land has its own version of the faith.”

Pete brightened.

“If that is truly a natural law,” he said, “then it applies across the board. The SOWs will suffer its effects just as we do. Only we have a tradition born of two thousand years’ experience in weathering its operation. I find that encouraging.”

“But supposing,” Schuld said, “just supposing—what if the SOWs are right and you are wrong? What if there is really a divine influence acting to suspend this law for them? What then?”

Pete bowed his head, raised it, and smiled again.

“It is as the Arabs say, ‘If it is the will of God it comes to pass.’ “

“Allah,” Schuld corrected.

“What’s in a name? They differ from country to country.”

“That istrue. And from generation to generation. For that matter, given one more generation, everything may be different. Even the substance.”

“Possibly,” Pete said, rising to his feet. “Possibly. You have just reminded me that my bladder is brimming. Excuse me.”

As Pete headed off into the bushes, Tibor said, “Perhaps it was better not to antagonize him so. After all, it may just make him more difficult to deal with when the times comes to distract him or mislead him or whatever you have in mind for when we find Lufteufel.”

“I know what I am doing,” Schuld said. “I want to demonstrate how tenuous, how misguided, a thing it is that he represents.”

“I already know that you know more about religion than he does,” Tibor said, “being head of your whole church and all, and him just a trainee. You don’t have to show me that. I’d just as soon the rest of the trip went pleasantly and that we were all friends.”

Schuld laughed.

“Just wait and watch,” he said. “You will see that everything turns out properly.”

This is not at all the way that I envisaged this Pilg, Tibor thought. I wish that I could have done it alone, found Lufteufel by myself, taken his likeness without fuss or bother, gone back to Charlottesville and finished my work. That is all. I have a great aversion to disputes of any kind. Now this, here, with them. I don’t want to take sides. My feelings are with Pete, though. He didn’t start it. I don’t want a lesson in theology at his expense. I wish that it would just stop.

Pete returned.

“Getting a bit nippy,” he said, stooping to toss more sticks onto the fire.

“It is just you,” Schuld said, “feeling the outer darkness pressing in upon you, finally.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Pete said, straightening. “If you’re so damn gone on that dippy religion, why don’t you join it? Go bow down before the civil servant who gave the order that screwed things up! Model plaster busts of him from Tiber’s murch! Play bingo at his feet! Hold raffles and Day of Wrath benefit picnics, too, while you’re at it! You’ve still got a lot to learn, and that will all come later. But in the meantime, I just plain don’t give a shit!”

Schuld roared with laughter.

“Very good, Pete! Very good!” he said. “I’m glad the rigor mortis has left your tongue intact. And you’ve reminded me of something I must go do now myself.”

Schuld trudged off into the bushes, still chuckling.

“Damn that man!” Pete said. It is hard to keep recalling that he saved my life and that love is the name of the game. What has gotten into him that he is becoming my cross for today! That air-cooled, fuel-injection system with its absolutely balanced compression and exhaust cycle now seems aimed at ru

“Why did he get that way all of a sudden?” Pete said, half to himself.

“I think that he has something against Christianity,” Tibor said.

“I never would have guessed. Fu

“He did? That is strange, isn’t it?”

“How do you see what he was talking about, Tibor?”

“Sort of the way you do,” Tibor said. “I don’t think I give a shit either.”

Then they heard the howl, ending in a brief, intense yelp and a very faint whine. Then nothing.

“Toby!” Tibor screamed, activating the battery-powered circuit and driving his cart in the direction of the cry. “Toby!”

Pete spun about, raced to catch up with him. The cart broke through a stand of bushes, pushed past the gnarled hulk of a tree.

“Toby …” he heard Tibor say, as the cart screeched to a halt. Then, “You—killed—him—”

“Any other response would not have been personally viable,” he heard Schuld’s voice reply. “I maintain a standard reactive posture of nullification against subhuman forms which transgress. It’s a common experience with me, this challenge. They detect my—”

Flailing, the extensor lashed out like a snapped cable and caught Schuld across the face. The man stumbled back catching hold of a tree. He drew himself erect then. His helmet had been knocked to the ground. Rolling, it had come to a halt beside the body of the dog, whose neck was twisted back at an u