The Inconvenient God Page 3

  “Lady of sunshine and sweet rain,” I said, treasuring the feel of the words on my tongue. I pressed record on my unicom and said the words again, then hit replay. A flattened, reedy version of my voice filled the precinct. Ohin lifted an eyebrow.

  “You’re teaching your bracelet sacred words?” he asked. “I’ve heard people say adornment can be a form of prayer, but I’ve never heard of asking the adornment to do the praying.”

  “This will let me share the words with Amaya’s head priest, here at the university,” I explained. “If I forget, it will remember.”

  Ohin frowned. “Why in Amaya’s own name would her head priest want to hear these words from you?”

  “Because they’ve been lost for almost two hundred years,” I said, pained by an obscure sense of culpability.

  “What do you mean, ‘lost’?” As Ohin spoke, the bottles and cans by his feet rattled ominously, and I smelled ozone.

  “Do you remember stealing the first written exams?” I asked.

  Ohin’s gaze was distant. “Writing is a clever tool, but Amaya’s words must never be chained by it. It’s sacrilege,” he said, barely audible.

  “But the exam wasn’t in Amaya’s language. It was in the vernacular.”

  Ohin looked at me in confusion. From the waking world beyond our communion I dimly heard laughing voices call out, “Ohin, brother, you’ve gotta grant us a blessed high, because the statics exam is gonna sink us!” There was a tinkling sound as glass shattered somewhere in the shrine, and someone said, “Seven hells, that’s a Polity decommissioner—let’s get out of here!”

  Ohin’s form rippled, and for a moment he was again the dashing gallant I’d met in the morning, smiling knowingly and blowing a kiss in the direction of the retreating voices. But then he shimmered again, reappearing as the shaven-headed novice, his brow still knitted in incomprehension.

  “You didn’t know the exam would be in the vernacular?” I asked.

  He shook his head slowly. His lips parted, but he didn’t speak.

  A bone-penetrating sadness settled on me as I finished the story. “Eventually instruction at the seminary switched to the national language too,” I said. “Amaya’s sacred language fell into disuse and…was forgotten.”

  The scent of ozone grew even more intense. There was a rumble like thunder, a flash like lightning, and a blackened bough from the shrine pine appeared in Ohin’s fist, still festooned with underwear. His eyes fell on the torn lace of one of the undergarments, and briefly he reverted to the god of dropouts. “A boy just wants to spend his time with liquor on his lips and a lover in his arms,” he said, flashing a smile that was replaced almost instantly by an expression of desolation as he became again the youthful novice. He threw down the bough.

  “What have I become?” he asked, tears standing in his eyes. He wiped them away with the heels of his hands.

  “I won’t fail Amaya twice,” he said, and disappeared, ripping me out of trance state and leaving me shivering in the cold, long light of late afternoon.

  At the other end of the shrine precinct stood the girl from this morning, a heavy book bag slung across her chest and her arms folded tightly against its strap. “Why’d you have to do it?” she demanded as I approached. “Why’d you destroy Ohin?” Her Northwestern accent was thick, but what caught my attention were her eyebrows, which swooped beautifully, expressively—angrily—downward, and her lips, which reminded me of the statue of Amaya.

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t done anything,” I snapped. “The university has decided not to decommission Ohin after all.”

  It was strange that she had said destroy instead of decommission. Did she know that Ohin was an apotheosis? Now wasn’t the time to ask. Somewhere, Ohin was seeking retribution for a two-hundred-year-old wrong.

  The girl gave a decisive nod of the head. “Good. Decommissioning him was a stupid, small-hearted idea. Ohin never hurt anyone.”

  “Maybe not in the past, but I’m afraid he’s about to, and if he does, it’s going to make big trouble,” I said.

  The girl snorted. “Oh sure. What’s he going to do, spark an outbreak of lovers’ curse, or alcohol poisoning? People get into that trouble themselves; all he does is bless their actions. Not everyone is cut out for scholarship.”

  “You seem to be,” I said, nodding at her book bag.

  The girl’s face reddened, and she shifted the bag. “Exams start tomorrow… I’m trying to keep a scholarship.”

  “Exactly. You’re not a typical Ohin devotee. They break bottles here. You come and clean them up. They’re begging favors from him, but you’re here defending him.”

  She dropped her head and murmured something I couldn’t hear.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “I know things about him, that’s all,” she flared, then looked away again.

  “I do too,” I said. “I know he was a novice in Amaya’s seminary before he was deified.”

  The girl’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “That administrator told you,” she said angrily. “He shouldn’t have. That knowledge isn’t supposed to be shared with anyone who would harm Ohin.”

  “Deifying Ohin harmed Ohin!” I said.

  The girl laughed. “Leave it to a Polity decommissioner to call deification harm. It would have been better for him just to have been forgotten? Deifying him is probably the only generous thing the university has ever done for a failing student.”

  The university had deified him? I stared at the girl, stunned. But with that piece in place, the picture was much clearer.

  “Ohin wasn’t a failing student,” I said slowly. “That’s just the story that got put out to satisfy Polity investigators. The university elevated Ohin as a deity of dropouts and debauchery to overwrite his true past. It was cover for the institution, not a tribute to a dead novice. But now that act has come back to haunt them. If you do care about him—and about the future of the university—you have to help me stop whatever Ohin’s about to do. And then, maybe, we can honor him in a way he deserves.”

  In the distance, an electronic chime sounded the hour. Long shadows from the refectory refuse bins now stretched across the shrine grounds. The girl searched my face.

  “You’re serious,” she said.

  “Very,” I said.

  She bit her lip. “All right,” she said at last. “I’ll help. My name’s An-maya.”

  “‘Of Amaya’?” I guessed.

  She nodded. “It’s a super-common girl’s name around here. My parents have a big devotion to Amaya. Myself, I prefer the Abstractions.”

  I filed that piece of information away for later; it was an interesting contrast to what Mr. Haksola had said—maybe a generational difference.

  “What should I call you?” An-maya asked.

  “I’m Decommissioner 37.”

  An-maya made a face. “You give up names when you join the Ministry?”

  “No; it’s just policy to… Look, never mind: You can call me Sweeting.”

  “Sweeting? That’s your name?”

  “It’s a childhood nickname,” I said, and before An-maya could laugh or ask more questions, I told her what had happened at her namesake’s shrine and how Ohin had reacted when he learned about the loss of Amaya’s sacred language.

  “So, he stole the exams to prevent a sacrilege, but it ended up being for nothing. He lost everything, even himself,” An-maya burst out.

  I nodded. “And just now, before he departed, he said he wasn’t going to fail Amaya a second time. I’m afraid he’s going to attack the delegation that’s arriving tomorrow for the Infinitesimal Materials Center groundbreaking. The coincidence of Polity officials arriving more or less on the anniversary of his death and elevation has to be too tempting to pass up.”

  “Usually he settles for things like causing the Polity flag to appear on all the sheets of toilet paper in the dormitories,” An-maya muttered.

  “Usually he hasn’t just remembered who he is and what’s been lost,
” I pointed out. I rested the toe of my boot on the charred pine bough Ohin had flung down. “The thing I’m wondering is, when and where he’ll make his attack.”

  “That’s easy. Tarta Pass,” An-maya said, without hesitation.

  The name meant nothing to me.

  “You came here by train, right? Do you remember, maybe twenty minutes before arriving at Nando City, a spot where the mountains pressed in on both sides? That’s Tarta Pass. It’s the only break in the mountains for leagues if you’re coming from the southeast. Before the railroad was put through, an ancient highway followed that route. It’s got to be where Ohin attacked the delegation two hundred years ago.”

  “How quickly can we get there?” I asked.

  “It’s the end of the work day. The roads are going to be crowded at this hour, and you don’t have a vehicle… It’ll be dark before we get anywhere.”

  I imagined the two of us scrabbling around blindly in a mountain pass. It seemed hopeless.

  “Unless…” An-maya hesitated.

  “Unless what?”

  “Can you ride a moto-velo? There’s a rental place near campus and a whole network of trails—we could bypass the roads entirely. One trail comes out on a lookout spot above the pass.” An-maya pressed her palms together and brought them to her lips, prayer fashion. “Assuming there are moto-velos available, then if we go at top speed, we should get there while it’s still light.”

  “Let’s go then!” I said, gesturing for her to lead the way.

  “But can you really ride, dressed like that? Your cape looks, uh, inconvenient.”

  “I’ll manage.”

  “I didn’t think Ohin could do anything off campus,” An-maya said as we walked through the university’s main gate and out into Nando City.

  “He’s a god. Even if the terms of his apotheosis limit his sphere of influence, I’m sure he can overcome the restriction if he has a reason to try, and he’s got one. I’m curious: How did you come to know as much about him as you do?”

  She shrugged. “I’m a history major; I like finding out stuff about the past. At Nando, everywhere you look, there’s some weird bit of history to notice, and one thing I noticed was that Ohin’s shrine had no plaque. And it was so sad looking! I wondered why, so I dug around, but it turns out there’s nothing written about him anywhere. I kept poking, though, and eventually I got a call from a retiring professor who told me the story—well, the university’s version, anyway. It’s been handed down through the generations, but never written down.”

  “Oral transmission only,” I said. The irony wasn’t lost on me.

  An-maya nodded, then frowned. “You said that elevating Ohin was a way for the university to protect itself, but it seems like a lot of trouble to go to. Wouldn’t it have been better to let the whole incident just fade into the past?”

  “What Ohin did—it was on behalf of Amaya and the seminary’s intellectual freedom,” I replied, conscious that even explaining this might be considered borderline seditious. “He lost his life for their sake. If the university hadn’t done something to honor him, his vengeful ghost would likely have made trouble. So, they needed to celebrate him, honor him somehow. What better way than by deifying him in a manner that conformed with the version of events that they wanted accepted?”

  An-maya’s frown deepened. “So wrong,” she muttered.

  By then we’d arrived at the moto-velo rental, and we were in luck: I was able to rent two, though the proprietor charged overnight fees as it was so late in the day. I paid still more for some battered helmets, which the proprietor claimed were a legal requirement for all riders. An-maya’s eyeroll made me doubt this, but we didn’t have time for an argument. We donned the helmets, and An-maya mounted one of the moto-velos and revved the engine, enveloping us both in fumy smoke. She took off toward the hills, and I followed close behind her.

  After about a half hour of climbing at full throttle, we broke from the dark mountain cypresses into an open area that overlooked Tarta Pass. Yellowed grasses, pink-tinged in the light of the setting sun, rippled in the breeze, and on the far side of the pass the few aspens that hadn’t shed their leaves glowed like candles amid the cypresses.

  There were already visitors at the lookout. Two young men, students, judging from their coveralls, were reclining in the grass, amid bottles of hard cider and persimmon wine. When we’d dismounted from our moto-velos and the exhaust had cleared, an unmistakable pungent odor told us they were indulging in dreamers-herb as well.

  “Coming up by moto-velo is cheating, ladies,” one of them drawled. “You’re only flash if you hike. Want a puff?” He held out a long, slim clay pipe. “It’s Ten Thousand Sunny Days varietal.”

  “I’m low-tolerance,” An-maya said, waving it away. “But if you’re offering, I’ll have some of that.” She pointed at the persimmon wine.

  “You’ve got taste,” the other student said, passing An-maya the whole bottle.

  She wiped its mouth on the sleeve of her coverall and took a swig. We had just gotten far enough in introductions to learn that the two were named Dila and Derok, and that they were likely to be flunking out of the School of Engineering next term, when Derok pushed himself upright and squinted at me, frowning.

  “That one’s the divine decommissioner we saw at the shrine,” he said. The way he leaned over and cupped his hand by Dila’s ear suggested he intended to whisper, but it came out at ordinary volume. Then, to me, in tones of inebriated wonderment rather than accusation, “You’re here to decommission Ohin.”

  “Don’t know why you’re even bothering,” Dila remarked, lying down completely. “We’ll just make our petitions to Mischief instead.”

  “You will, won’t you,” I said. In a rush of gratitude, I realized Dila’s words held the key to a way out of the Ohin mess. But first things first. I came to the edge of the outlook and peered down. Far below were the railroad tracks, silvery parallel lines cutting their way through the mountains.

  “I don’t know if this is maybe normal for decommissioners, but uh…your bag there is smoking,” said Derok, eyeing my satchel, which I’d left on the seat of the moto-velo. I raced over and dumped out the contents. Smoke was rising from my entire remaining supply of divine resin beads.

  “Pantheon of deities and Abstractions,” I swore under my breath. It had to mean Ohin was present, or near. I tried to recite the litany of Sweet Harbor gods, but all that came to my mind and lips was my assent to Amaya: Let my actions be guided by your desire. Not knowing what else to do, I pushed the resin beads to the edges of the lookout. Had I marked out a big enough space? Would the students all go into trance too? There was no way of knowing.

  “Isn’t that a fire hazard?” asked Derok. The beads were now glowing cherry red. Before I could do anything about them, movement on the tracks below caught my eye: a hunched figure, picking his way delicately along the track, head down as if he were searching for something he’d dropped. Mr. Haksola. At some distance behind him, a work crew followed, periodically clustering to examine the tracks. Had Mr. Haksola, like An-maya, concluded that Ohin was most likely to cause trouble in Tarta Pass? Were he and the work crew on the same mission as we were?

  “Ma’am, this stuff is intense,” murmured Dila.

  The aromatic smoke from the resin beads had completely overpowered the dreamers-herb. I inhaled deeply, and as it filled my lungs, a vision filled my mind: novices in bandit garb, panting, bedraggled, and scrambling toward me up the side of the pass along a narrow path made by deer or wild goats, while from below came the sound of shouts and firearms.

  “There’s a path down to the tracks—I’m going down. It’s probably dangerous; you all stay here,” I said.

  I lowered myself over the edge of the outlook, then clung to it for dear life as I searched for purchase with my feet. I closed my eyes, willing the vision back into my mind. My feet found firm ground. I opened my eyes and slipped, slid, grabbed, twisted, stumbled, and tumbled to the base of the outlook
. Before I could get my bearings, a bruising shower of pebbles and loose stones pelted my head and shoulders, and I realized with alarm that the others had followed me down.

  Standing before us, and looking oddly unalarmed, was Mr. Haksola.

  “You’re here because of Ohin, aren’t you—have you found anything?” I asked, still breathless.

  “Two hundred years ago, they came by palanquin. Tomorrow they’ll travel by train,” Mr. Haksola said, a peculiar nonresponse.

  “Mr. Haksola? Are you all right?” I waved a hand in front of his face, but he didn’t respond.

  An-maya said something I couldn’t hear, and Dila giggled. Mr. Haksola’s gaze turned slowly toward them, and his eyebrows drew together slightly in an expression of mild perplexity. “Mr. Haksola, it’s late,” I said, a little louder. “What are you doing here?” His head swiveled back my way, and he blinked.

  “Foiling sabotage,” he said, his voice flat, almost absentminded. Then he perked up a little. “See this?” He opened his left hand to reveal a narrow metal cylinder, such as schoolchildren carry writing styluses in. “It’s a remote-control detonator. You could be up in the hills, or even at Nando City Station, and press it, and it would still work.”

  I licked my lips, swallowed. “Did you…did you find any charges set?”

  He looked at me blankly, then turned his attention to the detonator, turning it round in his hand. He ran a finger lightly over one end of it.

  “That’s what you’d press,” he murmured.

  “Yes… You need to find the charges and dispose of them—isn’t that what you were doing?” I glanced over at the work crew for confirmation of this, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. It was the same crew that had been sent to dismantle Ohin’s shrine. Now they stood motionless, their faces vacant.

  “No charges,” the crew chief said, distant cheer in her voice. “See?” She set down a sturdy metal case, pressed a latch, and opened it. “Empty.”

  My heart hammered as I recalled the view from the lookout. Had the crew been inspecting the track, or had they been laying charges? Was the case empty because they hadn’t discovered any explosives, or because they’d placed explosives that they themselves had brought?