Death is a God Who Wants His Laws Obeyed by Scott Payne
1900 words, ~9 minutes reading time
Issue 10 (Spring 10)
Tig had come to plead for her dead. They lay in shallow niches, nestled slantwise within the maroon velvet padding of the deadship. Tig climbed stiffly among them, pitcher of clay in hand, to inspect her work. She had daubed the seven bodies with fastidious care, leaving only their unblinking eyes exposed to the void. The ship’s upper hull was transparent, giving the dead an unsparing view of the emptiness about them. It was their final glimpse of darkness before they would be forever commended to the warm embrace of Jove’s Kiln.
Unless the final sacrament were denied them. Unless Tig failed to squeeze even a modicum of mercy from her Church. She looked with pained care over each still, clay-cocooned body. None of them was older than middle-aged. Two of them were very young indeed, their supine heads barely reaching halfway up their niches. Tig gently stroked the face of the nearest one, smoothing the cool, damp clay. Life on Callisto was a hard and cramped existence. Not many made it past the inevitable cancers, the industrial miasmas or the ceaseless overwork to enjoy old age. Tig herself was one of the few exceptions - due in no small part, she knew, to her privileges as a priest.
Tig knew the faces of her dead. They were congregants she steered through pairings and separations, strained to sustain their faith through the enveloping bleakness that overtook every colonist. She had administered the final rites to all but the youngest two: Perla and Onni. She welcomed them to the world, whispering into their tiny ears the secret names of Jove. A year later, Tig draped them with holly as they were given names of their own. Throughout their short lives, Tig played the part of comforter and guide, watching as they grew. And as Callisto took and took and took, Tig grieved with them all, through the loss of their own loved ones.
But grief alone would not suffice now. Tig forced herself to turn from her dead and shuffle down the red slope, her velcro-boots softly pulling from the velvet. Jupiter’s pale, curdled vastness loomed above the deadship, rapidly swallowing the blackness at its periphery. And there, growing to immensity just above Tig’s head, swirled the hallowed red storm of Jove’s Kiln. Tig began to murmur a shaky benediction but soon lost track of her own words, too troubled by the coming confrontation to focus on prayer.
Tig instead prepared herself to voice the need of her seven dead to the priests that barred their path. Their plea was undeniable. As Tig herself had taught them, only in Jove’s Kiln could the shoddy vessels that were their bodies be hardened so as to forever grip their souls. Only in Jove’s Kiln could the sacred transmutation take place. Otherwise, no matter where their remains were lain, no matter how deeply buried, their souls would escape their coarse trappings and dissipate into the cold blackness. Having witnessed their suffering in life, Tig could not bear to see her people irrevocably lost in death, mere fuel for entropy.
The deadship had no need of handling. Having been attuned to Tig before departing from Callisto’s grubby port, it acted upon her whims before she had even reached a conscious decision. The ship now smoothly decelerated as it neared her destination. The Gateway, a silver necklace of interlocking beads and blocks, rotated slowly just below Jove’s Kiln. In regular circumstances, the Gateway’s proboscis would have already been extending to the ship, ready to gently accept its dead. From there, under Tig’s supervision, the final rituals would be conducted and the bodies cast one-by-one from the Gateway into Jove’s Kiln.
For three years, this most vital rite had been forbidden, the Gateway to Jove’s Kiln shut. All because of the stubbornness of Eteo, Callisto’s newly raised Archon. Eager to distinguish himself, Eteo reasserted long-discarded rights of his office, clumsily seizing prerogatives of the Church. The Church had reacted by placing Callisto under interdict. From birth to death, Callisto’s unfortunate subjects were now deprived of all sacraments. Perla and Onni had been the last birth blessings Tig administered.
A sensation of stillness abruptly brought Tig back to herself. The deadship had arrived. Yet the surrounding Gateway kept to itself, spinning like a cold halo. The bodies lay unclaimed in their niches. All was silent. Tig gripped her elbows with clay-streaked hands, rehearsing her appeals. She startled when she felt the braille-like missive scrawl itself across the skin of her inner forearm:
The interdict is known to you
Why have you come
Leave now child
Tig took a few breaths to calm herself before tracing her reply along her opposite forearm:
I bring seven souls
I know them
Innocent
Please accept them
Please
Minutes passed in silence. Tig scuffled back and forth, occasionally raising her gaze to the agitated redness of Jove’s Kiln, enormous and boiling above her. She could sense the familiar eyes at her back. She could feel the souls in the balance, caught between Eteo’s foolishness and the Church’s pride.
Then:
The interdict is without exception
Leave now
Tig closed her eyes and fought down a black upwelling of despondency. She wrote back furiously, nearly drawing blood from her arm:
I will not leave
I am a priest of this Church
I speak for these dead
I require an audience with the prelate
The response was even longer in coming. Tig was on the brink of repeating her message when it arrived:
Stubbornness brands you for stupidity
But come
Tig nearly fell to the floor, overcome by an inward blooming of desperate hope. The deadship jolted as the thin proboscis extended from the Gateway and clamped onto the invisible airlock. Tig looked to her dead a final time before trudging her way toward the Gateway, her thrill at this small victory already fading.
The Jovian Church had hosted historic disputations in its time. Over the centuries, a number of these had become legendary. Supplicants whose unadorned sincerity had shocked into wakefulness the slumbering conscience of the Church. Advocates whose eloquence and subtlety would be studied by envious rhetoricians for generations to come. Discourses that healed long-festering divisions. Tig herself had studied many of these disputations during her training for the priesthood. She knew well the power that sharp speech could exert, chipping its way through even the fossilised edifice of settled doctrine.
But this had been no such thing. Tig returned to the deadship after less than an hour, mindlessly wiping her sweating palms on her sodden robes. She couldn’t bear to face the silent charges whom she had failed so completely. Tig paced aimlessly for a few moments before collapsing onto the soft velvet flooring, nearly tipping over her pitcher where she had left it.
Tig’s audience with the prelate had been a farce. As the wrinkled man dribbled out a series of soft platitudes about the authority of the Church, the two young assistants at his back, who appeared to have prepared this lecture themselves, had smiled with self-satisfaction. The expressionless prelate had been visibly uninterested, bored even, as he piffled on about old precedents and dictates concerning the Church’s right of interdict. He seemed to take no notice or interest in what impact, if any, his words had on Tig.
But had Tig played her part in this frivolous performance any better? When her moment came, when the prelate finally halted his stream of banalities and began to turn away, Tig’s wits had failed her. She had been overwhelmed by the simplicity, the sheer conspicuousness, of her people’s need. How to articulate an injustice so obvious that even a child could see it? How to force sight upon an old fool who had committed himself to comfortable blindness?
And so Tig had done little more than splutter on about her dead being innocent of Eteo’s folly: a weak echo of arguments long since made by more articulate tongues than hers. She had babbled about their lives, their eccentricities and failings. She had spoken about these being people, real people whom she had known and cared for, not mere pawns in some jurisdictional spat. When the prelate appeared unmoved, Tig had been reduced to simply repeating their seven names like a feeble spell: Onni, Perla, Jacob, Seo-a, Tadgh, Alma, Abshir.With the names of her dead still spilling from her, Tig had been dismissed and escorted back to the Gateway’s proboscis.
It had been a futile journey to a foregone destination. The interdict upon Callisto would not be lifted, not even to preserve the seven faithful souls she had brought to the Gateway. Jove had spoken through his intermediary, and He would not grant mercy. Tig squeezed her eyes shut. Failure – utter, shameful failure. After a moment, she slowly rose and looked upward to Jove’s Kiln. There was no comfort in the thought, but at least she was free, now, to continue the real debate. The question that had been churning within her since the moment she left Callisto. The one decision that mattered.
Tig slowly faced the expectant dead arranged upslope above her. She felt their silent need more powerfully now than any of the hundreds of times they had sought her help in life. Whether they had needed comfort or direction or simply someone to unburden themselves to, she had never denied them. Tig could not bear the thought of turning from them now. But what were these seven against the many hundreds who still lived and suffered on Callisto? Those unfortunates who relied on her care, paltry as it was? The ones who awaited her return even now. Their pull felt nearly irresistible.
Besides, who was Tig to resist the will of Jove, He whom she had dedicated her life to?
And yet Tig was not certain. For there were other gods. Older ones. And their laws could not be subverted.
Tig nearly jumped when she felt, unbidden, the subtle motion of the deadship - a soft tug within her stomach. The ship had begun gliding past the Gateway, directly towards Jove’s Kiln. As it picked up speed, the Kiln grew into a great baleful eye, transfixing Tig in its red glare. Tig smiled. Whether Jove approved or not, she had made her choice.
Tig grasped her pitcher of clay and clambered up the dark slope. She lay down among her fellows, just between Onni and Perla. She raised her knees so that the soles of her boots were planted firmly onto the velvet. There was no time for precision. Tig began to scoop large handfuls of clay onto her body, smearing the cool muck about herself. She ignored the stream of angry, frantic words that began inscribing themselves across her arm. She barely felt the immense heat as the ship was licked by the enveloping storm. Tig saw and felt nothing but the overwhelming redness. She recited, a final time, the names of the dead: Onni, Perla, Jacob, Seo-a, Tadgh, Alma, Abshir, Tig.
In silence, the eight were accepted into Jove’s Kiln.
