Night of Light

“She is his wife. He killed her upon Earth and fled here. But he created her the first night of the Sleep.”

“Ahhhh!”

The seven of Algul sucked in their breath and drew back.

Carmody blinked at them. Apparently, Tand’s information held implications he didn’t see.

“John,” she said, “it is no use your murdering me again and again. I always rise. I always will. And I am ready to bear the child you did not want; he will be here within the hour. At dawn.”

Quietly, but with a tremor in his voice that betrayed the great strain he felt, Tand said, “Well, Carmody, which shall it be?”

“Which?” said Carmody, sounding stupid even to himself.

“Yes,” said the leader of Algul, stepping back beneath the pedestal. “Which shall it be? Shall the baby be Yess or Algul?”

“So that is it!” said Carmody. “The economy of the Goddess, of Nature, of What- have-you. Why create a baby when one is at hand?”

“Yes,” said Mary loudly, her voice still musical but demanding, like a bronze bell. “John, you do not want our baby to be as you were, do you? A frozen dark soul? You do want him to be of heat and light, don’t you?”

“Man,” said Tand, “don’t you see that you have already chosen who the babe shall be? Don’t you know that she has no brain of her own, that what she says is what you think, really think and truly desire in the depths of your soul? Don’t you know that you are putting her words into her mouth, that her lips move as you direct them?”

Carmody almost fainted, but not from weakness and hunger of body.

Light, light, light... Fire, fire, fire... Let himself dissolve. Like the phoenix, he would rise again...

“Catch me, Tand,” he whispered.

“Jump,” said Tand, laughing loudly. A roar of laughter and of cries that sounded like hallelujahs burst from the men of Yess.

But the men of Algul shouted in alarm and began ru

At the same time the dark purplish haze began to grow lighter, to turn pale violet. Then, suddenly, the ball of fire was above the horizon, and the violet light was white again, as if someone had yanked aside a veil.

And those of the men of Algul who were still in sight staggered, fell to the ground, and died in the midst of convulsions that threw them from side to side and that broke their bones. For a time they thrashed like chickens with their heads cut off, then, bloody- mouthed, lay still.

“Had you chosen otherwise,” said Tand, still embracing Carmody after his leap downward, “we would be lying in the dust of the street.”

They began walking toward the temple, forming a circle around Mary, who walked slowly and stopped now and then as the pains struck her. Carmody, walking behind her, gritted his teeth and moaned softly, for he too felt the pangs. He was not alone; the others were biting their lips and holding their hands tight upon their bellies.

“And what happens afterward to her—to it?” he whispered to Tand. He whispered because, even if he knew that this Mary-thing was not self-conscious, was really manipulated by his thoughts—and now by those of the others, too—he had become suddenly sensitive to the feelings of other people. He did not want to take a chance on hurting her, even if such a thing did not seem possible.

“Her work will be done when Yess is born,” said the Kareenan. “She will die. She is dying now, began dying when the Sleep ended. She is being kept alive by our combined energies and by the unconscious will of the infant within her. Let us hurry. Soon the Wakers will be coming from their vaults, not knowing if this time Yess or Algul won, not knowing if they must rejoice or weep. We must not leave them long in doubt, but must get to the Temple. There we will enter the holy chamber of the Great Mother, will lie in mystical love and procreation with Her, in that act that ca

He squeezed Carmody’s hand affectionately, then tightened his grip as the pangs struck again. But Carmody did not feel the bone-squeezing strength because he was fighting his own pain, hot and hard in his own belly, rising and falling in waves, the terrible hurt and awful ecstasy of giving birth to divinity.

That pain was also the light and fire of himself still exploding and dissolving into a million pieces. But now there was no panic, only a joy he had never known in accepting this light and fire and in the sureness that he would at the end of this destruction be whole, be one as few men are.

Through this pain, this joy, this sureness was a lacing of determination that he would pay for what he had done. Not pay in the sense that he would forever be plunged into self-punishment, into gloom and remorse and self-hate. No, that was a sickness, that was not the healthy way to pay. He must make up for what he had been and had done. This universe, though it still ran like a hard cold machine and presented no really sweet- smiling face to mankind, this world could be changed.

What means he would employ and just what sort of goal he would choose, he did not know now. That would come later. At this moment, he was too busy carrying out the final act of the drama of the Sleep and the Awakening.

Suddenly he saw the faces of two men he had never expected to see any more. Ralloux and Skelder. The same, yet transfigured. Gone was the agony on Ralloux’s face, replaced by serenity. Gone was the harshness and rigidity on Skelder’s face, replaced by the softness of a smile.

“So you two came through all right,” Carmody said throatily.

Wonderingly, he noted that one was still clad in his monk’s robes but that the other had cast them off and was dressed in native clothes. He would have liked to find out just why this man accepted and the other rejected, but he was sure that both had their good and sufficient reasons, otherwise they would not have survived. The same look was on both their faces, and at the moment it did not matter which path either had chosen for his future.

“So you both came through,” Carmody murmured, still scarcely able to believe it.

“Yes,” replied one of them, which one Carmody couldn’t determine, so dreamlike did everything seem, except for the reality of the waves of pain within his bowels. “Yes, we both came through the fire. But we were almost destroyed. On Dante’s Joy, you know, you get what you really want.”

PART TWO

“And now I must go back to Kareen?” Father John Carmody said. “After twenty-seven years!”

He had been sitting quietly enough while Cardinal Faskins told him what the Church wanted of him. But he could be motionless no longer. Although he did not soar from his chair, he rose swiftly, arms up and then out, as if he intended to fly. And that posture expressed what he wished to do at that moment—wing away from the cardinal and all he represented.

He began pacing back and forth across the polished, close-grained, dark gooma-wood floors, his hands clasped behind him for a while, then unlocked, only to rejoin above his stomach. Outwardly, he had not changed much; he was still a little porcupine of a man. But now he wore the maroon garb of a priest of the Order of St. Jairus.

Cardinal Faskins stooped in his chair, his green eyes bright above the big hooked nose. His head turned this way and then that to keep the pacing Carmody in view. He looked like an aged hawk uncertain of his prey but determined to make a move at the first chance. His face was wrinkled; his hair, white. A half-decade ago, he had voluntarily given up jerries, and his one hundred and twenty-seven years were catching up with him.