“Does it make you afraid?”
Her gaze flickered toward him, then away. “I tasted real fear once, the day I realized that a force more powerful than all my people combined was set to devour them one by one. The day I realized I would have to fight alongside humans in order to defeat it. Next to that . . .” She shrugged. “What’s a little water? I can swim. Fur dries.”
“What about Novatlantis?”
She nodded tensely. “That was frightening. I admit it.”
They were silent for a few minutes, side by side, remembering. A sky that roared in fury as it thundered black ash down upon its invaders. An ocean that boiled with the birth of a new island, so close to the Glory that a carpet of dead fish rippled in her wake. The stink of sulfur. The deadly nonstink of carbon dioxide. Sunlight blotted out by airborne debris. Smoking pellets that fell from the sky, that probably wouldn’t have set fire to the sails but they had to be ready, they had to have water and buckets and men in the rigging . . . six hundred miles of hell, Rasya had estimated, and while not all of it was that bad, there was the constant fear that it would become so. Not a pleasant trip, he mused. Not one he was anxious to repeat.
“Could I ask you a question?” she asked him. Hesitantly, as though the request might offend him.
“Of course.” He turned to face her, leaning one arm against the railing. Surprised, but not displeased by her query. It was rare she talked to the humans at all, and rarer still that she turned to one of them for help of any kind; species hostility still ran hot in her blood. “Anything, Hesseth. What is it?”
“I was wondering . . .” Again a hint of hesitation, as if she didn’t know the proper way to express herself. “This is hard to put into words.”
“The simplest way is often the best.”
She considered it. And nodded, slowly. “All right, then. Explain it to me. Your Church. Your faith. You talk about it like a religion, but it isn’t just that, is it? I’ve seen human religions—I thought I understood them—but yours is different. When you and Tarrant get together . . . it sounds more like a campaign than a faith, sometimes. Not like I’ve seen in the others. Why?”
“Tell me first what you see in others, and I’ll try to answer you.”
Her eyes, jet black in the darkness, narrowed as she considered. “Your kind has a need to believe that its species is the center of the universe. Some religions address that. You have a need to control your fate; some address that, at least in theory. You want certain things from the world, and so you create gods who’ll deliver them. You fear death, and so there are gods to administrate your afterlives. Etcetera. Etcetera.”
“And the rakh have no such needs?”
“The rakh are the rakh,” she said smoothly. “Very different. Assst, how can I explain it to you? Our species is one small part of a very complex world, and we sense—and accept—our natural place in it. We see this planet as a living, breathing thing and we know ourselves an element of it. We understand what birth and death are to us, and we’re at peace with that understanding. How can I explain? So many of these things have no words, because we never had a need to describe them. The world is. The rakh are. That’s enough for us.”
“Humans struggle all their lives to achieve such acceptance,” he mused. “And rarely succeed.”
“I know. When I’m not filled with fury at their destructiveness—or amazement at their stupidity—I sometimes feel sorry for them. Is that what human religions address?”
“In part.”
“And yours?”
“In part.” He shifted his weight so that he was more comfortable. “How well do you understand the fae?”
“It’s part of us. Like the air we breathe. How can I divorce myself from it enough to answer you?”
“I meant, how well do you understand what it is to humans?”
Her lips curled in a scornful smile. “Your brains are a chaotic mess. That makes the fae a chaotic mess when it responds to you. Right?”
“Damn close,” he muttered. “Look. If a tribe of rakh live in a land where water’s been scarce, if they and their mounts go thirsty, if the plants themselves need rainfall to survive . . . what happens?”
She shrugged. “It rains.”
“All right. Why? Because living things need, and that need affects the fae, and the fae alters the laws of probability, making rain more likely . . . are you with me?”
She nodded.
“Now, consider the human brain. Three distinct levels of functioning, myriad separate parts, each with its own way of reasoning—if reasoning it can be called—some by pure instinct, some by intelligence, some by methods so abstract we have no way of even describing them. All interconnected in such a way that a single thought, a single need, can awaken a thousand responses. Is there drought in the land? One part thirsts. One part wishes for rain. One part fears that rain will never come. One part thinks that if death by thirst is close by, it ought to indulge itself in every pleasure it can. One is angry at nature for starving it, and translates that anger into other things. One channels its fear into violence, in the hope that by redirecting its terror it need not face it head on. One is joyful because enemies are dying also, and another feels that death by dehydration is nature’s just reward for some transgression, real or imagined, which it committed. All of that at once, inside one human head. Little wonder your people consider it chaotic. There’s a type of doctor whose only purpose is to help humans wade through that mess and come to terms with who and what they are. An understanding your people take for granted.”
“So the fae responds to us, just like it responds to you. But it doesn’t recognize that all these levels are integral parts of the same being, it just takes the cue nearest at hand and responds to it. At least that’s how we understand it. With some people the response falls into a predictable pattern—they can always control it, they can never control it, the fae responds to fears, or to hopes, or to hates . . . but with most people the response is utterly random.”
“We do know that religious images are particularly volatile. So much so that over a hundred gods and messiahs appeared in the first twenty years after the Landing. Those were mere illusions; they had little substance and no power of their own. Reflections of mankind’s need for divine reassurance, no more. But as generation after generation poured their hopes and their fears and their dreams into such images, they gained in strength. They gained in power.”
“They took on the personae that man ascribed to them, and came to believe in their own existence. We know that some of the colonists believed in a god-born messiah who would come and save them. The result was twenty false messiahs, each one more convincing than the last. Each one a construct of the fae, who blindly gave us what we wanted or feared the most. And of course they all fed on us, in one way or another. That’s what constructs do: they feed on their source. That’s why even the pleasant ones are so terribly dangerous.”
“There was a time called the Dark Ages, when terror and havoc reigned. Fortunately, there were still a few men and women with clear enough vision to realize that something must be done . . . something to mold the human imagination so that it ceased to be its own worst enemy. Thus the Revival was born, an experiment in rigid social structure based upon traditional Earth-values. It was moderately successful. And the Church was founded. A small movement at first, barely of consequence, which taught that the God of Earth was the only divine creature worthy of worship. Because that one God was a concept so vast, so omnipotent, that not all the fae on Erna could mimic it.”
“And then along came one very gifted man who said, what if we take this concept one step further? What if we mold this faith so that it channels our energies creatively, so that it creates for us the world we want? You must understand, no one had ever thought on that scale before. No one had ever conceived of manipulating the fae as he planned to do: by manipulating humanity’s collective consciousness, so that the fae was forced to respond. It was a brilliant vision, unparalleled in scope. It’s the cornerstone of my faith.”