Allor walked down the dusty road into the town. Burned-out wooden buildings lined the road. There were bodies lying on the road too. Most bodies were missing their heads.
Allor didn’t like taking heads, despite having done it several times. But when it came to the cult of Ceros, you fought them with the same brutality they used. Or you lost.
“I will kill every one of their priests,” said Tal, Allor’s tall, slender mother. Her once black hair had now succumbed to the streaks of gray added to it, giving it the look of white swirling through black marble. The handsome woman with striking features walked beside Allor, a light sword in her hand. She spoke in a loud voice for all to hear.
“Survivors, heed my words. The only living God is here to heal you, to help you, to save you from death. Come to him quickly to be healed before the death of Ceros descends upon you,” she yelled. There was no response at first, but then a head popped out from behind a tree. Then another. And another.
“Come here. Be saved by the only living god. Allor loves you and will heal you,” she yelled like a man in front of a strip club in a seedy port city known for being the birthplace of jazz. People began to come towards them, but only thirty-eight of them came. They drudged their way down the dirt road, past the headless bodies with the red-stained ground surrounding them, the zombie-like disorder of horror evident in their gait.
“How far are we from the border?” asked Allor.
“At least fifteen kilomaatars,” replied Pens, the high priest. “This is the deepest ever.”
“I was young when they attacked our village. I was only ten kilos,” replied Allor.
Allor was angry, and he kicked at the supports of a building that was burned but hadn’t tumbled to the ground yet. He kicked at the black, charred vertical support over and over until it finally snapped. As it began to crumble, he turned the control of his PPS to high and the falling debris bounced off the shell around him and fell to the ground. This scared some of the people coming to him for help.
“Don’t be afraid. Allor is angry because of your pain. He hates the things that hurt you. It is righteous, it is justified.” Tal’s words boomed out over the big emptiness that had once been a village of several hundreds.
“It’s all right,” Allor said as he walked to the woman closest to him. He held up his arms to the sky. She looked at him strangely at first. Then slowly and painfully she did the same.
Allor smiled. Then, beginning at the tips of her outstretched fingers to the tough callouses of her feet, he examined her. Her thrice-broken finger was restored. The small tumor on her bladder was eliminated. A deep spear wound in her side was closed and restored, and millions of Candida Albicans were destroyed. After a few seconds of the most perfect health of her life, she turned to the crowd.
“I am healed. You all saw it. I was near death but now I am in full health again. This is the Living God, Allor. Allor the healer. Bring him your pain,” the woman called out. As she moved away, Tal placed a pendant on a leather cord around her neck. The stone was blue and round.
“This is how we know we are among His Own,” Tal repeated to the woman. Then Tal opened her cloak to reveal her own blue medallion. And so it was with everyone healed that day, they wore the blue that would become the symbol of the biggest bubble since one a long time ago involving tulips.
And the crowd grew to eighty-one. Allor healed them all. “Repay your debt to me by helping another in need,” he repeated to each of them. As he healed the last one, he looked at the group of the survivors gathered to bury their dead.
In-ground burial was the agreement in the merger of the Cult of Allor and the Underones, a well-established cult of just under two million. The Underones believed in underground burial and that their God, whose name must not be spoken, existed at the center of Earth 7.
He lived in the core. Yeah, that core. The inner core, the spherical ball of solid metal that measures about 2,400 kilomaatars across. The one most often made from a solid ball of iron and nickel. Yep, that’s the one. The one place you can be sure that there are no lavatories.
So when the two cults merged, Allor agreed and decreed that all of his family and followers must be buried underground. In exchange, The Underones would magically accept Allor as “he who resides at the center of Earth 7.” And you know that “god whose name must not be mentioned” stuff? Well, that’s to be forgotten too. He’s here now and he wants us all to call him Allor. And the former Underones, now His Own, accepted this without any further thought.
But then cults don’t handle further thought very well, do they? They have a problem as soon as someone says, “Hey, wait a minute, do you realize how stupid this is?”
“No,” most of them scream back in anger as they wave angry fists. “We hate you and want to kill you now. Heathen. Infidel”.
But shouldn’t heathen be a synonym for rational or intelligent? Instead, it is a word used to describe those people you shouldn’t invite to a dinner party due to impolite topics of conversation they are sure to raise and the potential for very bad table manners. A pedantic Marxist with flatulence comes to mind. The kind of person that would use a spork. Oh yeah, and they don’t believe your particular brand of stupid shit either.
Believe crazy shit versus believe crazy shit and also want to kill me because of it? In the end, these are just two distinct stages of the same disease.
It was almost a thousand revs ago when Ceros raided their village a second time again. Allor’s father was quick to get them to safety. Roa’s mother and father were not. Roa’s father, Cen, had been working his fields when the raiders came over the hill on their horses. He was killed at the edge of the field and his body left where it fell. His head was tossed into the wagon that accompanied the raiders, collecting valuable things.
Roa and her mother were murdered in their farmhouse, their heads finally collected after being forced to perform acts of entertainment and brutal comfort.
Allor and his father found their bodies. Losay held his crying son and felt the anger, the hurt, the longing, the breaking of his son as the young man trembled in his arms. And when his son finally raised his face to his father, Losay saw the one thing he feared the most. He saw Allor’s rage.
But now, as Allor walked down the dirt road of this border town, past the bodies, past the broken and scattered things, as he surveyed all of this, he looked at his mother with understanding.
“You may be right, Tal. They are such animals that they need something incredible to keep them under control,” he said.
“My son. You can finally bring this madness to an end. How long has it been now, these damned raids?”
“All of my life.” Allor replied.
“And all of mine too,” replied his mother. “And even my mother before that. As far back as we can imagine, these groups have burned down our villages, our towns, taken people as slaves. Forced rules and observances upon us with life-or-death consequences. But you, my son, the man who heals people, not because he has to, but because he can, my son, you can bring an end to this once and for all.”
Tal looked at him with the eyes of a mother and the fierceness only available to women. Then she turned around in the road and looked to see two people, a man and a young girl, coming down the road towards them. They didn’t have blue medallions.
“Come get healed,” Tal yelled to them and motioned with her hand. She noticed the limp in the man’s gait and moved forward to help him. Allor began walking towards the man. “He is the one living God Allor,” she yelled.
Allor fingered the ring Rao had given him. It was supposed to be his wedding ring.
“They will perish,” Tal said to Allor.
“My priests are ready to fight them on your command,” replied Pens, the high priest. He turned over a body to see it had been wearing a blue medallion. He picked up the medallion and put it into the pocket of his robe.
“Let’s leave them to The Expected,” replied Tal with a confident tone.
The Expected are approximately 5,000 fanatics under Tal’s control. Together Tal and Allor’s sister, Canto, assembled this group and trained them. They will be used to purge the newly conquered areas of past religious affiliations. They will kill priests, sack temples, and destroy the largest symbols of the former rulers.
Now whenever there is a healing, Canto and Tal work the crowd. And it becomes just a numbers game. Gather enough people together and you get all of the personality types. Ever been to a meeting or a conference and you find several people that are absolutely fascinated by what you are presenting to the audience? It is that lethal combination of adulation and their personal eureka moment about something they consider profound, even if it’s not. These are the people that become The Expected. Why?
“Only with great enthusiasm can one accomplish great atrocities.” — The Final McGee.
“Headless priests of the Ceros will adorn the walls in my chambers,” replied Pens.
“I have no doubt of that,” said Tal with a smile.
Tal and Pens were the principal evangelists for the Cult of Allor. But it wasn’t a hard job. They had the only real person deity, real like the kind that you can poke with a finger, and that claimed to be a god. And he could heal the sick. And he could appear and disappear at will. And he could travel great distances quickly. And he couldn’t be hurt. Yeah, their job was easy. Some shit just sells itself, like really good ganja.
The Cult of Allor had nearly four million followers and a growth rate that made the other cults worry about their own market share.
But Tal had always been a proponent of active parenting.
When she discovered that her son had technology that would permit him to appear and disappear at will, which meant that he could also steal whatever he wanted, Tal began to provide him with very specific items in very specific places. With never a single word of self-congratulations, Tal took her son from someone that could always put food on the table to the most successful thief in the history of Earth 7. It was award-winning motherhood. But don’t judge her too harshly.
Tal had been raised poor due to the inability of her father to choose winning turtles among groups of turtles slowly motoring their Winnebago-like shells towards a piece of lettuce in a backroom of a building owned by people with dangerous histories and surrounded by many yelling and cheering people offering encouragement.
Yes, after that sort of humble beginning, “Mother of God” would do her quite nicely.
Canto arrived. They watched her bubble burst, the clear gold energy containment bubble disappearing like a large soap bubble suddenly popped.
“I’ve been calculating the numbers we need. I think it should be one in fifty at a maximum,” said Canto as she walked over to her brother and kissed his cheek.
Canto is in charge of the network of informants established in new territory. The ratio is informants to gen pop (general population).
“That is four times the original estimate,” Tal said in almost a question.
“I know. It’s what they did originally. I checked the reader,” replied Canto.
By original, Canto means the original designers of a network of micro-local informants that operated back on Earth 5 in Eastern Europe and the largest island in the Caribbean for a short period until it got on people’s nerves and they said “no thank you” very loudly and resolutely and people did courageous acts of “no thank you.”
But Canto and Tal know better than those old grumpy men and women back on Earth 5. They will succeed where others have failed. This time it will be different, they believe. Tal says she believes it with all of her heart. This seems akin to a fuel pump having an opinion.
“So what is the result?” asked Allor.
“It will take more time to establish the network and get it operating smoothly. But there is an upside,” Canto said with a grin.
“What’s that?” her brother asked her.
“More heads,” she said with a large smile.
Canto is in charge of the purges in the general population. They start quickly and end quickly. When they began with the former Underones, 0.8 percent of the population was murdered in just under three weeks. It was 15,882 people in total. After that, the underlying structural rate of 0.12 percent became the norm per 500 revs. 2,382 humans if you are keeping up with the math. Yes, I have given you enough information to deduce that the original population of the Underones was 1,985,374, but if you expect me to explain how to derive that then you are mistaken and should have not looked out the window so much during math class.
And with purges come detached heads—heads on a stick, to be specific. Canto liked them, Allor did not.
“No heads near the temple,” Allor reminded Canto.
“Except in my quarters,” she reminded him in return.
“Yes, in your quarters,” Allor said with the disgusted tone of a reluctant compromise reached.
Tal picked up another blue pendant from the ground beside a headless body of a woman.
“This must end soon,” she said.
“The Underones are integrated,” replied Canto. “They are all now His Own. We are as ready as we will ever be, my brother.”
“I know,” Allor said sadly. “I regret my terrible things done to stop terrible things.”
“Death to Ceros,” Tal said forcefully.
“Yes, death to Ceros,” replied Pens, nearly yelling.
“Death to Ceros,” Canto said. “Screw them,” she added, oblivious to the fact that she was wishing something most often quite pleasurable upon the group she hated the most. But she didn’t mean soft, sweet, pleasurable sex. No, she meant mean sex, the kind of sex you have with someone when you are angry with them, or when she is the girl that didn’t inhale quite enough chloroform before you dragged her away from the party.
“Death to Ceros,” Allor finally agreed, but without enthusiasm. Healing people had started to change him into something he didn’t know he could be and probably didn’t want to be either.
Finally Canto looked at Allor with a sly smile.
“Are you sure you don’t want to start with Niddler?” she said with a smile.
They all laughed.
I guess I should mention something about the Cult of Niddler. Let’s see if we can do this without an org chart.
The cult of Niddler was founded by Anto Niddler, a man with mental problems and a partially blocked trachea, that would experience moments of bliss and have visions right before losing consciousness. He couldn’t find regular work because of his condition, so he would go around preaching about his visions, speaking of them so vaguely that people could read many things into the words. He soon discovered that people gave him money when he did this, so he kept doing it.
Cult members try to recreate his bliss by holding their breath until they pass out. Most don’t last long enough to lose consciousness, and losing consciousness is considered by devotees to be reaching a higher level of consciousness, despite the obvious contradiction. But even the successful breath holders don’t get the visions like Anto Niddler.
Temples for the cult of Niddler are renowned for their elaborate cushions spread all over the floor. Anto Niddler died 279 revs ago from asphyxiation. His final words were to his mother: “See you next Tuesday.” Tuesday is now the Sabbath day for all Niddler devotees.
The only true destiny I ever found:
People that await the return of a messiah are destined to die disappointed.
Unless, of course, he just stepped out for a moment. To have a cigarette or get something he forgot in the car. That sort of thing. Although I must question what sort of god you are worshiping. Cigarettes. Forgetting. You should have stayed in university like your father and I wanted.
— The First McGee