‘If O3 catch you,’ he told me, ‘you will tell them all of this. Everyone does. Everyone. All the Army asks is that you try to hold out for one hour.’
A Delta fighter of the Illyrian Air Force darted silently above us. These strange, flat aircraft used the DM technology pioneered by my own dead father to swallow up momentum. They could travel at great speed and yet stop instantaneously. Suddenly it was motionless right overhead. The painted black-and-white eye of Illyria glared down at us for a moment from the fighter’s belly. Then, equally suddenly, equally silently, it darted off again over the mountains in a perpendicular direction and we were alone again among the scree and snow.
‘Why have you joined the AHS?’ Yussef asked me.
We had stopped to eat our lunch in a high grassy valley. It was a wide shallow U-shape in section, contained by ridges of jagged, snowy rocks. But a stream had cut a deep, narrow gorge right down the middle of it.
This gorge was in fact the border of Illyria and Epiros. It had once been crossed by one of those graceful stone bridges from Ottoman times that you see all over the region, but the middle section of the bridge was missing. (I don’t know whether it was demolished by the Illyrians or the Outlanders of Epiros, or whether it had simply collapsed). On the far side were the ruins of a small monastery.
‘Why did I join the AHS?’
I hesitated, then said something rather incoherent about the narrowness of the Illyrian regime and how it was becoming as repressive as the religious states on the far side of that gorge.
My answer did not seem to impress either of them much.
‘We both joined because it is intolerable that it should be a crime for us to worship God,’ Yussef told me.
Janine nodded.
It was the first time that I had ever encountered the phenomenon of religious faith at close quarters inside Illyria itself. I meekly asked them to tell me what it was they believed in. They were only too happy to oblige.
It seemed they both believed in God, and in a Book that was the infallible word of God, and in a Man who lived long ago and was, so to speak, God’s spokesman on Earth. Unfortunately, though, they did not believe in either the same Book or the same Man, Yussef’s Book being the Qu’ran and his Man Mohammed, Janine’s being the Bible and Jesus.
It was Janine who made the most impact on me, I suppose because she was the most similar in age and background to myself. I’d heard the things she said a few times before, for example from that fierce priest in Ioannina who had been my opposite number in the trade negotiations. But the priest had been a very foreign sort of being, in a very foreign sort of place. He even looked like something from the Middle Ages. It was a very different matter to hear these things from a young, educated, American-Illyrian in modern dress.
Janine told me that the whole visible universe was a testing ground for souls. Souls who passed the test would go on to another world in which they would experience eternal bliss. Souls who failed would be sent to a place where they would be horribly punished, without hope of remission, for the rest of eternity.
According to Janine, all souls, without exception, were so wicked as to deserve this eternal punishment, on account of some crime committed by our remote ancestors. (What this crime was, or why we should be blamed for it now, I didn’t get clear in my mind). But, so Janine told me, a loving God had provided us with an escape route. If, and only if, we acknowledged Jesus Christ as our saviour, there was still a possibility that we might be saved.
I asked her was there was no other way at all? Was she saying that, unless we changed our beliefs, both I and Yussef would go to hell?
She nodded.
‘Well, what about people who’ve never heard of Jesus?’ I asked her, ‘What about children who die before they’ve learnt to speak.’
Janine looked at me with her clear blue eyes and smiled.
‘There is no other way to salvation except through Jesus Christ,’ she calmly repeated.
‘But what does that mean?’ I asked her, ‘What does it mean to acknowledge Jesus as your saviour?’
Behind her, Yussef, with his different certainties, shook his head and smiled. He believed that the way to paradise was by acknowledging that there was no God but God and by following the rules that God’s prophet Mohammed had written down at the dictation of an angel. (It seemed, though, that his religion was rather more tolerant than Janine’s and granted at least the possibility that virtuous adherents of other monotheistic faiths might also avoid hell.)
‘Acknowledging Jesus as your saviour,’ said Janine, ‘means believing that God in his love for us gave his only son as a sacrifice for our sins, and that, through his sacrifice and his resurrection, the Son of God opened the way to eternal life.’
I shook my head. I was so amazed by this stuff that I had completely forgotten my normal reticence:
‘Let me get this straight! You’re saying that what happens to me for the rest of eternity all hinges on whether or not I believe that certain specific events took place back in the days of the Roman Empire? That’s – what? – more than twice as long ago as the Norman conquest of England?!’
Janine nodded serenely.
I was appalled. To give myself space, I got up and walked over to the edge of the gorge. I looked down into the bleak chasm under the ruined bridge.
It was partly the sheer arbitrariness of Janine’s beliefs that shocked me, their threadbare logic, their enormous internal contradictions. How could anyone believe, for example, that a loving and omnipotent God could tolerate the existence of a torture chamber where the agony would never end? That God had briefly sent his ‘son’ to Earth 2,000 years ago, that this son had very briefly ‘died’, or that we might escape hell if we believed this: these things hardly seemed adequate compensation for the fact that hell was God’s idea in the first place.
I suppose I was disappointed too. Conventional opinion in Illyria was, of course, that religion was ignorant and savage, so I wasn’t wholly surprised. But I think I had secretly hoped to have that preconception proved wrong. If so, my hope had been misplaced. Janine’s religion had taken mystery and reduced it to a kind of inexorable machine.
I think what I found most repellent of all was the contempt which Janine’s belief system showed to all the other attempts that human beings had made to understand their place in the world. To every other belief, however honestly held, however hard-won, however bravely adhered to, Janine was saying, quite literally, ‘You can all go to hell!’
‘We need to make a move, George!’ Yussef called across to me.
I turned away from the broken bridge. Yussef and Janine were shouldering their packs.
It was then that I realized that there was a rather more personal aspect to all this. Whether I liked it or not, I was stuck with these two. I might not like Janine’s beliefs or Yussef’s any more than I liked President Kung’s, but it was too late for me to change my mind about joining the AHS.
‘Any problems, George?’ Yussef asked as I joined them and pulled on my own pack. ‘You look sort of worried.’
‘No,’ I said hastily, ‘I’m fine. There’s just a lot to take on board all at once.’
The Delta fighter reappeared overhead, stopped dead, and darted off again in the direction of the city. It was obviously watching us.
If I stayed with the AHS, I reminded myself, it was very likely that I’d be captured by O3 and see for myself those torture chambers under the mountain at Kakavia, Illyria’s very own and very scientific hell. If I left, the AHS itself would kill me. There was no safe place for me any more.