“Now, my children! Now! I bless you all this night!”
People started to move. A trickle at first, then a few more, and still more. The converts, the new blood, seeking the way to such perfection as they had witnessed. A number left, of course—but the bulk of the audience stayed seated, eyes still fixed where but a minute before perfection had stood, still seeing the sight in their mind’s eye and afraid to turn away lest they lose it.
The spotlight dimmed, then was no more. The stage was dark for a moment, then soft lights came up as Mother Sukra returned to direct those who wished to join to the proper places. Of the High Priestess there was no sign.
Yua, offstage, peered out at the crowd, and a thrill went through her at the number approaching the Acolytes. She felt good inside, as if she had accomplished a great deal. There were times when it got discouraging, when few were swayed despite it all; but tonight the spirit was within her and the spirit moved them. It was good.
People, mostly Temple members, walked busily back and forth, their eyes glazed with renewed faith and zeal, ignoring her completely, which was understandable since they could not see her. Yet another attribute of the Olympians was in use, the ability to blend into just about any background. It was a good exit and a good way to avoid throngs of people, although, unlike invisibility, it betrayed you if you moved very rapidly. She waited until the coast was clear, then beat it for her downstairs apartment. She felt drained, as she always did after a rally.
That same look of dazed fanaticism was in the eyes of the young couple standing before the robed Acolyte. The Temple member, trained for this sort of thing, looked them over. No more than late teens themselves, he decided.
“You wish to join our holy cause?” he asked seriously. “It is not a step to be taken lightly, yet it is the first step to salvation.”
“Oh, yes,” they breathed. “We are ready.”
“Have you family who is responsible for you?” he asked them. It was a required question and saved a lot of headaches later.
“We are married,” the young woman assured him. “Just got a small farm outside Tabak.”
“You wish to enter the Fellowship, freely and of your own will?” the Acolyte continued. Standard procedure. It was really a tough job, since the questions could easily break a mood if asked in the wrong tone.
The young couple looked at each other, then back to the Acolyte. “We do,” they assured him as one.
The Acolyte was familiar with the type. Small farmers, probably given the land at marriage, both children of farmers who had looked forward to a certain but dull destiny. Now they saw a quick way out.
“Will we… travel?” the young man asked.
The Acolyte nodded. “You will see many places and experience many things.”
“Will… will we see her again?” The woman almost sighed.
Again, the Acolyte nodded. “She, or her sisters, are with us as our teachers and our guides.”
The couple was quickly accepted and passed on to the more formal processor, whose primary responsibility was to get their zeal on a piece of recorder paper along with their thumbprints in case of later legal challenge. Many times the Com Police and other religions had sent ringers to make sure that the laws were observed. They would be. Cops quickly tired and dropped out of the regimen; the ringers were often the best converts of all, since they were already involved in one faith.
The contract was not a simple one; almost nobody read it, including the ones who weren’t for real—those who could read, that is—and none of the Acolytes could remember anyone taking advantage of the offer to have it completely read to them. Such procedures were recorded, of course, also for defense of later legal challenge.
And the contracts would be challenged, most of them, by family and friends outside the cult. In effect, they signed over everything they owned to the Mother Church, forever. Under Com law such a contract could be canceled even if not signed under fraud or duress within even days of signing; after that it was “sealed” and even if you later resigned, the Church kept all.
During the next seven days it was the job of expert indoctrinators to see that nobody canceled. It was a measure of effectiveness that few did.
There would be singing and dancing, hugging and kissing, praying and rejoicing in total communal fellowship, as individuality was worn down and the newcomers were kept in an emotionally high state. Recalcitrants during the mass period would see the Holy Priestess herself before they left. They usually didn’t leave after that.
It was an easy cult to accept, too. Your bad habits, dietary and otherwise, were discouraged, and peer pressure usually got you into the mold, but they were not prohibited either. Nor, except for the indoctrination period, were they celibate.
They did good works, too. For every proselytizer stalking the streets and spaceports of the thousand human Com Worlds, there were five working in the poorest communities, feeding, clothing, sheltering those in need with no questions asked and displaying no prejudices of any sort. These good works were the more common, although slower, ways of gaining converts.
On the eighth day the young couple would undergo a sacred and solemn ceremony; their clothing and old possessions would be burned in a sacred fire said to have been carried from Olympus, and they would have their heads and bodies shaved and don the robes of the Acolyte. Then would come the full religious study, aided by hypnotics and all other means at the cult’s command, until they were so immersed in the dogma and so dependent on the Mother Church for even the most basic things that they thought no other way. Then they would be ready to take to the streets, to ask every stranger if in fact he—or even she—was Nathan Brazil, and to carry out the good works of the Church.
It was spreading, yes, but discouragingly slowly from world to world, so slowly that none of the Olympians believed they would see it as a truly dominant force in their very long lifetimes. The nonhuman races paid no attention whatever; the concept that the one true God would choose to go around as a human was pretty insulting.
And through it all, government and press found nothing wrong in its behavior and didn’t worry overmuch as it built because of its slow growth rate. Although they wondered about Olympus, about whether those strange superwomen whose world was off-limits to all were sincere in their religion or practicing a new and slow but effective form of conquest. If so, nobody would be alive to really see such a thing happen. It would be somebody else’s problem unless something happened to cause a massive growth in church membership. Even the Olympians admitted that.
None of them had yet heard of the Dreel, let alone guessed their implications. Not yet, not yet.
Com Police Headquarters, Suba
They stared when Marquoz plodded down a hallway. They always stared at a creature that looked mostly like a meter-high Tyrannosaurus rex wearing a vest and smoking a large cigar. He was used to it and ignored them.
The Com had expanded enormously in the past few centuries; it had also become far less totalitarian since the huge criminal-political drug syndicate had been broken centuries earlier. The old syndicate had carefully limited expansion so that frontier worlds were developed only at a pace which it could easily control and eventually take over. The discovery of a cure for their main hold on the leadership of those worlds—and the even greater shock at just how many worlds had been run by the power-mad hidden monarchs from their private little worlds of luxurious depravity—had caused a total reevaluation of the Com and the directions in which humanity had been going.