A trust that will never be betrayed. He turned round, Bible in hand. The leather-bound book his mother had given him when he became a novice; it even had a little inscription she had written in the cover, the black ink fading to a watery blue down the decades.
Freya gave him a slightly surprised look, then sneered. Oh, poor Father! Do you need your crutch so badly? Or do you hide from true life behind your belief?
Holy Father, Lord of Heaven and the mortal world, in humility and obedience, I do ask Your aid in this act of sanctification, through Jesus Christ who walked among us to know our failings, grant me Your blessing in my task, Horst incanted. It was so long ago since he had read the litany in the Unified prayer-book; and never before had he spoken the words, not in an age of science and universal knowledge, living in an arcology of crumbling concrete and gleaming composite. Even the Church questioned their need: they were a relic of the days when faith and paganism were still as one. But now they shone like the sun in his mind.
Freyas contempt descended into shock. What? She flung her legs off the bed.
My Lord God, look upon Your servant Freya Chester, fallen to this unclean spirit, and permit her cleansing; in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Horst made the sign of the cross above the furious little girl.
Stop it, you old fool. You think I fear that, your blind faith? Her control over her form was slipping. The healthy clean image flickered on and off like a faulty light, exposing the frail malnourished child underneath.
I beseech You to grant me Your strength, O Lord; so that her soul may be saved from damnation.
The Bible burst into flames. Horst groaned as the heat gnawed at his hand. He dropped it to the floor where it sputtered close to the leg of the bed. His hand was agony, as though it was dipped in boiling oil.
Freyas face was screwed up in determination, great rubberlike folds of skin distorting her pretty features almost beyond recognition. Fuck you, priest. The obscenity seemed ludicrous coming from a child. Ill burn your mind out of your skull. Ill cook your brain in its own blood. Her possessed shape shimmered again. The lame Freya below was choking.
Horst clutched at his crucifix with his good hand. In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, I order you, servant of Lucifer, to be gone from this girl. Return to the formless nothing where you belong.
Freya let out a piercing shriek. How did you know!
Begone from this world. There is no place in the sight of God for those who would dwell in Evil.
How, priest? Her head turned from side to side, neck muscles straining as though she was fighting some invisible force. Tell me ...
Heat was building along Horsts spine. He was sweating profusely, frightened she really would burn him. It was like the worst case of sunburn he had ever known, as though his skin was splitting open. His clothes would catch fire soon, he was sure.
He thrust the crucifix towards the girl. Freya Chester, come forth, come into the light and the glory of our Lord.
And Freya Chester was solidly before him, thin sunken face racked by pain, spittle on her chin. Her mouth was working, struggling around complex words. Terror pounced from her black eyes.
Come, Freya! Horst shouted jubilantly. Come forth, there is nothing to fear. The Lord awaits.
Father. Her voice was tragically frail. She coughed, spewing out a meagre spray of saliva and stomach juices. Father, help.
In God we trust, to deliver us from evil. We seek Your justice, knowing we are not worthy. We drink of Your blood, and eat of Your flesh so we may share in Your glory. Yet we are but the dust from which You made us. Guide us from our errors, Lord, for in ignorance and sin we know not what we do. And we ask for Your holy protection.
For one last supremely lucid moment the demon possessor returned. Freya glared at him with a ferocity which withered his resolution by its sheer malice.
I wont forget you, she ground out between her curled lips. Never in all eternity will I forget you, priest.
Unseen hands scrabbled at his throat, tiny fingers, like an infants. Blood emerged from the grazes sharp nails left around his Adams apple. He held the crucifix on high, defiant that Christs symbol would triumph.
Freya let out a last bellow of rage. Then the demon spirit was gone in a blast of noxious arctic air which blew Horst backwards. Neatly stacked piles of food packets went tumbling over, the bedlinen took flight, loose articles stampeded off the dresser and table. There was a bang like a castle door slamming in the face of an invading army.
Freya, the real Freya, all crusty sores, ragged clothes, and bony famined figure, was stretched out on the bed, emitting quiet gurgles from her chapped mouth. She started to cry.
Horst clambered to his feet, hanging on to the edge of the bed for support. He drew a gasping breath, his body aching inside and out, as though he had swum an ocean.
Jay and a troop of frantic children rushed in, shouting in a confused babble.
Its all right, he told them, dabbing at the scratch marks on his throat. Everythings all right now.
When Jay awoke the next morning she was surprised to see she had overslept. She hardly ever did that, the few minutes alone to herself at the start of each morning were among the most precious of the day. But it had to be dawn. A pale tinge of hoary light was creeping into the cabins main room around the reed blinds. The other children were all still sound asleep. She quickly pulled on her shorts, boots, and an adult-sized shirt she had altered to something approximating her own size, and slipped quietly out of the door. Thirty seconds later she ran back in shouting for Father Horst at the top of her voice.
Far above the lonely savannah cabin, the long vivid contrails of thirteen starship fusion drives formed a cosmic mandala across the black pre-dawn sky.
Chapter 06
Lewis Sinclair had been born in 2059. He lived in Messopia, one of the first purpose-built industrial/accommodation/leisure complexes to be constructed on Spains Mediterranean coast; a cheerless mathematical warren of concrete, glass, and plastic which covered five square kilometres and sheltered ninety thousand people against the ferocious armada storms which were beginning to plague Earth. It was a heavily subsidized experiment by the European Federal Parliament, by that time desperate to tackle the cancerous underclass problem thrown up by the continents eighty-five million unemployed. Messopia was a qualified success; its medium-scale engineering industries provided only a minimal return for investors, but it provided a foretaste of the huge arcologies which in the centuries to come would house, protect, and employ Earths dangerously expanded population.
His path through life was never going to be anything other than troublesome; born to low-income parents, who were only in the new microcosm city because of the parliamentary law requiring a socially balanced population. There was no real niche for him in an enterprise geared so resolutely towards the middle-class job/family/home ethic. He played truant from school, turned to crime, drugs, violence. A textbook delinquent, one of thousands who ran through Messopias architecturally bankrupt corridors and malls.
It could have been different, if the education system had caught him early enough, if he had had the strength to hold out against peer pressure, if Messopias technocrat designers had been less contemptuous of the social sciences. The opportunities existed. Lewis Sinclair lived in an age of quite profound technological and economic progress, and never really knew it, let alone shared in it. The first batches of asteroid-mined metal were starting to supplement depleted planetary reserves; biotechnology was finally living up to its initial promise; crude examples of the affinity bond were being demonstrated; more and more non-polluting fusion plants were coming on-stream as the supplies of He3 mined from Jupiters atmosphere increased. But none of it reached down to his level of society. He died in 2076, seventeen years old; one year after the bitek habitat Eden was germinated in orbit around Jupiter, and one year before the New Kong asteroid settlement began its FTL stardrive research project. His death was as wasteful as his life, a fight with power-blade knives in a piss-puddled subterranean warehouse, him and his opponent both high on synthetic crack. The fight was over a thirteen-year-old girl they both wanted to pimp.