It would be best to get away from them before the pain pushed him beyond control. His small—and diminishing—area of rationality had never dwelled deeply on the nature of pleasure and pain. For his kind, pleasure was connected with the sensation of processing without any actual work involved—a high-order distillation of that which motivated their mundane, purposeful work-actions. Pain, on the other hand, arose from the introduction of hidden chaos factors into their proges. Long ago, the hunter’s blast had left such a trace, which acted up every now and then, ruining his social life and contributing to local gossip.
He snorted and stamped. He had labored once—a prisoner—in an encrypted space, a love-nest of a government official of the Verite, whose virtual companion had ruined the packaged ecology with her extravagant insistence on omnipresent bowers of flowers, to the point where the hopefully self-supporting space had overloaded and could no longer serve the second half of its dual function. Part of a crew of shanghaied labor, Tranto recalled the painful Chaos Factor control prods in the hands of Lady May’s overseers—and sometimes those of the lady herself—by which he and the others had been driven to offset the effects of the proges she had skewed. As terrible as the CF prods had been, they were never as massively traumatic as his spells—though they had, finally, served to set one off, the one which resulted in his destruction of much of that place, opening it to the attention which had led to Morris Rintal’s dismissal when it was discovered that diverted government funds had been used in its setting up-up, and to divorce, when his wife in the Verite had learned of his virtual lover.
A fresh wave of pain swept through him from the throbbing site of his old injury. He bellowed again and reached out with his forward appendage to uproot one of his recent plantings. He smashed it against the ground and brandished its remains overhead. “Very disturbing,” his fleeing rationality observed, and, “Really, too bad.”
He bellowed again and charged his fellows, who scattered with an agility and rapidity near-amazing to those other laborers only acquainted with the phants’ generally slow-moving ways. The other laborers were, of course, moving hurriedly themselves by then.
Tranto smashed several trees to the ground then turned away. His burning eyes focused upon the village, and he rushed off in that direction. The overseer proge withdrew its embodiments hastily.
Brandishing the tree trunk, Tranto demolished a hut, then threw his bulk against the next structure, to be met with a satisfying swaying and cracking. He hit it again. He swung the trunk. The wall went down. He bellowed then and stamped on through.
As he advanced upon the next, a spark of memory suggested that they would be after him soon, with CF prods, then with lethal weapons. As he trampled the building to ruin and listened to the cries of workers and foremen, he knew that he should turn away from this place, flee to some safe wilderness where he might abide until the attack had run its course and healing had begun.
He smashed another wall, drove the battered tree trunk against a second then sent it through the roof of a third. Yes, he really should be moving on. Only all these damned things seemed to be in the way.
Trumpeting, he stamped down the street, upsetting supply carts, trampling seed-objects as they spilled. They would be waiting for him at the transit station he was certain. If they could not stop him, they would try to transfer him to a secured space where a therapist would hurt him again, like last time. Better to flee in this direction and batter his own gate when he was in the clear. It would not be the first time he had broken through a chambering field. It seemed to grow progressively easier as the madness rose.
Once he was beyond the workplace he tested the limits of the area, feeling for the resistance to movement into another place entirely rather than other areas of this same locale. His sense of these matters always became highly acute at times like this. Soon he was pushing against a boundary in the midst of a fairly featureless field. It felt like tough mesh-work, both yielding and restraining, though with his first great shove he was able to see through it into an adjacent landscape. It was filled with buildings, vehicles, and heavy machinery, however, and he changed direction and pushed differently. A field. Good. He pushed that way. Three heavy onslaughts and he was through, rampaging over some sort of gar-den and through an orchard, upsetting its genius loci no end. No matter. Trumpeting, he ran.
Eight times he crossed barriers, wrecking a specialty farm, an executive meeting room, a Mars surface testing laboratory, a bowling alley, a brothel, a federal district court adjunct, and a virt campus, before achieving the solace of a grassy country and nearby jungle, where the genius loci considered his activities in keeping with the tenor of the environment and continued to doze.
Tranto had gone rogue again.
The congregation came from a chapel in Verite, where, following a brief invocation, they had repaired to a rearward chamber, disrobed, stretched out upon mortuary slabs to contemplate the travails of existence for a period of darkness, then risen in spirit to pass through a wall of flame and enter upon the sacred fields. There, they had proceeded, chanting the song of Enlil and Ninlil, to come at length to a corridor among ziggurats atop which lion-bodied spirits with the heads of men and women appeared, to come in with the choruses and with intonements of blessing. Beyond, the congregation achieved the precincts of the temple and was conducted into its courtyard.
Further ceremonies were conducted there, by a priest garbed similarly to themselves, save for the scapulary tablets and elaborate headgear of gold and semiprecious stones worn below his faint blue halo. He told them how all of the gods, along with everything else, survived in Virtu, and in this time of a turning back to religion it was appropriate that the earliest divine manifestations in Indo-European consciousness should be the focus of worship now, dwelling as they did in the deepest layers of the human psyche where description might still function. Ea, Shamash, Ninurta, Enki, Ninmah, Marduk, Azmuh, Inanna, Utu, Dumuzi, and all of the others—metaphors, yes, as were all who came after, for both the best and worst in humanity, but also the most potent of metaphors because of their primacy. And of course they were cosmomorphic as well, embodiments of the forces of nature, and as capable of evolution as everything in Virtu and Verite. Their beings extended to the quantum level as well as the relativistic. So sing their praises, he went on, ancient gods of quarks and galaxies, as well as the sky, the sea, and the mountains, the fire, the wind, and the burgeoning earth. Let all things rejoice and let us turn the stories of their doings to ritual. One of the gods was even now within the temple’s sanctum, enjoying this worship and sending blessings. A light meal was shared, and the worshipers embraced one and other briefly. The mundane offering of the Collect was done by means of electronic funds transfers, from the eft tokens all bore with them when visiting Virtu.
It was called the Church of Elish, from the Mesopotamian creation story, Enuma elish—meaning, roughly, “When above”—and the words “Elishism” and “Elishite” were derived therefrom, though members of the more traditional religions of the past few millennia had often referred to them as “Elshies.” At first lumped together with the many short-lived cults of Virtu—Gnostic, African, Spiritualist, Caribbean—it had shown greater staying power and, upon closer examination, demonstrated a more sophisticated theology, satisfying ritual, and better structured organization than the others. Its increasingly popularity indicated that it had been victorious in the divine wars. It did not demand mortification of the flesh beyond a few holy day fasts and apparently even involved “rituals of an orgiastic nature,” as some anthropologists put it. It incorporated traditional heavens and hells as fitting waiting places between incarnations alternating between Virtu and Verite, toward the eventual achievement of a transcendental state which combined the best of both realms. It had its representatives in both. Its followers had a tendency to refer to all other religions as “latecomers.”