“Only that you think the gift too lavish,” said Rashuri. “But I know that you will accept it with grace—lest you render all you’ve done these eight years pointless.”
“I could refuse. No one can force me to learn these new systems. If you put me aboard regardless, no one can force me to follow your orders.”
“That is quite true. Which is why I am glad that you understand that other ways would have to be found by which you can discharge your debt to the Consortium. Duties no doubt less attractive. Duties which will doubtless take far longer to complete.”
“But this mission would discharge my debt,” Charan said slowly. “And this would be my final obligation.”
Rashuri sighed. “If you insist on so describing it, yes.”
Charan pursed his lips. “Very well. I accept the ‘gift.’ Thank you—Father. But I will go as Tilak Charan. I will not carry your name with me.”
Charan saw the hurt in Rashuri’s eyes, but suppressed any regret.
There are few grateful slaves, old man
, he thought.
Arid until I return from this mission, a slave is exactly how I’ll think of myself
.
They took Joanna Wesley from a streetcorner near the Loop, grabbed her and were gone in a moment. Several saw, one from the alley, one from a window high overhead, one from a passing car, but there were three doing the taking and they wore the street colors which said there were more that stood behind them. And after all, they told themselves in the coldheartedness that owned the city, hadn’t enough black gangs troubled enough white girls to make a bit of evening-up in order?
They took her to a broken-faced building that had been a hotel when people used to come to the city by choice, and pushed her up the stairs in front of them. They harried and tripped her from behind so that she chipped a tooth and bruised her calves and forearms, and ended up crawling and scrabbling up the metal treads.
When they tired of that, they broke down a door and claimed the suite it opened to as theirs by writing the gang’s name and their own across the pastel walls with fat red markers while Joanna cowered, afraid even to run for the open door. When they were satisfied with their handiwork, the one named Brazz stripped Joanna of her clothes while the others held her.
Though she kicked and screamed with animal fury to prevent it, they tied her down on one of the two beds with her legs wide and her eyes wide with horror. While the others watched Brazz took her first, laughing as she wailed protests against the hardness that violated her. They tired of her screams before they tired of her body and filled her mouth with a wadded mass of toilet tissue to silence her.
Presently other appetites became more compelling, and they rummaged in the kitchenette for something that would satisfy them. There were utensils aplenty but little food, and the one named Spec went downstairs to see what the pantry of the hotel’s kitchen might still hold. While he waited Brazz amused himself with a sadistic version of mumblety-peg, tossing the kitchenette’s steak knives in tumbling arcs that ended point-down in the bedding and, from time to time, in Joanna’s flesh.
When Spec returned with an armload of packages, they settled down to eat without troubling to cook what he had found. What they found distasteful they flung at Joanna and by the time their meal was through she was coated not only with her blood and their stickiness but globs and smears of a half-dozen cold and greasy foods. They finished by urinating on her and then stood over her and jeered her in her humiliation.
It was the one named Eagle who thought of the firehose and dragged it from its compartment down the hall. The water from the standpipe on the hotel roof was cold and rusty but flowed with pummeling force as Eagle sprayed her body. They laughed as she struggled without effect to avoid it. When the flow began to abate, Eagle tried to rape Joanna with the nozzle, and they laughed again. Brazz took away the gag because he liked to hear her screams.
But something had happened to Joanna since they had first taken her, and she did not scream. She faced Brazz down with eyes that expressed inexpressible serenity and made him squirm until he growled and smashed a fist into her unprotected abdomen.
Joanna gasped but the white light remained in her eyes.
“I forgive you. But God will not,” she said.
Brazz laughed and spat in her face, then yanked the valve handle of the nozzle Eagle had buried in her body. The last of the rusty water mixed with blood flowed from Joanna as she twisted back and forth crying, “God will kill you for me, God will kill you for me, God will kill you for me.”
They were still laughing except for Brazz, who put the gag back not because he believed what she was saying, but because he did not like to hear it.
Three hours later, Brazz awoke retching. Crying for the others, he struggled to a sitting position on the second bed as the bitter smell of his vomitus filled the room.
Eagle wrinkled his nose in disgust and evinced no sympathy. “Ooh, our head hurts, and the tummy, too,” he said in a mocking sing-song tone. “If nigger girls make you sick, you shouldn’t have them.” He waggled a disapproving finger.
“I can’t hardly swallow. I’m being choked,” wheezed Brazz, rubbing frantically at his throat with both hands.
Eagle pounded Brazz’s back as though it were a cure for any breathing ailment. “Hell, who wants to swallow after they barfed?”
But a half hour later, Brazz was dead. “I can’t move,” was his last plaint, voiced in a raspy whisper. After that they heard nothing but strangling noises.
“She’s a goddamn witch or sum’thin,” said Eagle. By then a brutal headache was making his temples dance. He ripped the sodden tissue from Joanna’s mouth. “Stop what you’re doin’,” he demanded. “I’ll kill you right now if you don’t.”
“It’s in God’s hands,” she whispered.
Eagle beat her with his belt until a wave of nausea doubled him over. He tried to hand the belt to Spec but it slipped from his fingers to the floor. “Make ’er stop,” he begged weakly. “Make ’er stop.”
Awed, Spec sat crouching a few feet away and watched him die. Spec then slowly approached the bed where Joanna lay.
“I’ll let you go,” he said. “Will you ask Him not to kill me?”
“It’s in God’s hands.”
“I’ll let you go,” he said pleadingly. “I didn’t do as much as they did.” He fumbled with the knots. Removing the ropes from her wrists tore open scabs that had formed over groovelike friction burns.
“You’ll have to help me,” said Joanna, grimacing as she tried to stand.
“I’ll take you to a doc,” he promised fervently.
“Take me home.”
Dismay crossed Spec’s face. “They’ll kill me.”
“God can protect you if your heart has changed.”
Shucking his colors, he took her to the porch steps of her home and then ran. And lived, and spread the world on the streets about the woman who had called down death in the name of God. Spec had never heard of botulism. He never stopped to ask if his birdlike appetite had kept him from sharing a can of poison.
Joanna was whisked to Northwestern University Hospital where a complete hysterectomy was performed as part of a three-hour operation to repair the damage her captors had done. Six weeks later she stood in the third pew of the North Side Church of the Second Coming to witness to her experiences.
Speaking in a soft voice, she described her ordeal. Dispassionately, almost as though it had happened to someone else, she told of her rape and humiliation. On hearing her many cried or cried out protests. She sent a small affectionate smile at friends seated nearby as though to comfort them. But she showed no other emotion, no need of receiving comfort herself.
“I prayed for Jesus to deliver me, and at the height of my agony He answered me. ‘I am with you, Joanna,’ He said to me. ‘I have heard your prayers and I will answer them. Abide in your faith.’ And he struck them down, first one, then another. They died there in agony for their sin. The third repented and spared me and God spared him.” She hesitated and lowered her eyes. “I thank my Lord and praise His name for His power and His mercies.”
The preacher then took up the moment.
“This is a God of
power
. This is a God of
love
. This is a God of
judgment
. This is a God of
mercy
. If your soul is in harmony with His laws, then you will know eternal life. If your soul is blackened by unrepentent sin, you will know eternal agony. For these young men, the time of judgment came without warning, sudden and terrible.
“But never forget that for all of us, the time of judgment is at hand. Even now the host approaches, making way for the King of Creation, come to banish evil and bring the Age of Light. Hear his herald’s call.”
The sounds of the Sender message filled the Church, and the congregation swayed to its alien rhythms. Joanna closed her eyes and rocked and let the music fill her and it was like a familiar voice saying, “I am with you, Joanna.”
A report on Joanna Wesley crossed Carl Cooke’s desk a week later. “I want to talk to this one,” he told his aides. “And the boy who lived. Arrange it for our trip to Chicago.”
Joanna was polite but not deferential as she was ushered into Cook’s presence. She answered his questions directly and without embellishment.
“You are a practical nurse by trade?”
“Yes.”
“I am told you were not a regular at church until your recent experience.”
“That’s true.”
“So you had a rebirth in Jesus before the miracle.”
“I don’t call it a miracle, First Scion.”
“Why do you think God saved you?”
“I don’t know,” she said with disarming honesty. “Do you think it means He has special plans for you?”
“No.”
“How many times have you told the story of what happened to you?”
“Twice. To my parents and in church.”
“Have you been offered money for your story?”
“Yes. There was a woman who wanted to write a book, and a man who wanted me on his television show.”
“What did you tell them?”
“I told them no.”
“How do you feel about men?”
“I’m not angry at them, if that’s what you mean.”
“And sex? She hesitated. “What happened to me was not sex. I can’t have children, but I still look forward to sharing God’s gift of pleasure with a special mate.”
Cooke nodded. “There’s someone I would like you to meet.” He pressed a button on his desk and a side door opened. Through the door came a sullen-faced, slight-bodied teen, followed by a church orderly.
“Good morning, Spec,” Joanna said placidly. “I hope you are well.”
“You said I wouldn’t have to see her. Get me away from her,” Spec snapped angrily. He averted his gaze so as not to look at her and sidled back toward the door.
Cooke studied the quality of Joanna’s expression—calm—and the small amount of tension in her pose. At a gesture from him, the orderly escorted Spec from the room.
“You bear even him no ill will?”
“God judges, not I.”
“Yes.” Cooke sat down in a chair facing her and reached out to touch her hand. It was cool and dry. “Joanna, you were brought here because God has revealed to me that you were saved for a purpose. You have felt His power and you have responded with faith, not fear. You have been tested, terribly, because the task ahead will be a demanding one.
“In Jerusalem they came out of the city and paved His way with palms. You will go out from Earth as the voice of His people and pave His way with praise. But it will require that you commit yourself this day to the intensive study of matters both holy and secular. Are you willing?”
She lowered her eyes. “If you think me worthy, First Scion, then I am willing.”
“Your acts will be the measure of your worth.”
Zhang Wenyuan was born the year the mobs hunted down and killed all the dogs in Beijing.
His mother saw such Party-directed slaughter as an affirmation that she had been right to quietly drown two girl babies born to her in preceding years. In a time of limits, priorities had to be set. If they were only to be allowed one child, she and her husband were determined that it be a boy.
As though tainted by the violence which had surrounded his birth, Major Zhang Wenyuan had used a calculating brutality to rise far and fast in the abstruse world of Chinese party politics. His intelligence work during the War of Chinese Unification won him commendations, but it was the Vladivostok campaign of ’07 which launched him solidly ahead of his peers. It was a simple, bold stroke: when the confusion resulting from the revolt of the Republics against Moscow was at its peak, Wenyuan led the Ninth Revolutionary Army across the border into Rossijskaja.
The invasion caught both the central and regional government unprepared to fight back. Vladivostok was taken almost bloodlessly, the scientific facilities, refrigeration plant, and Zoloti Rog docks undamaged. So smoothly did the transfer of authority take place that when the fishing fleet came back in, the only changes the crews found were that they reported to a new dock supervisor and their considerable catch was destined for a new market.
Vladivostok had been adventurism, yes, but successful adventurism was not so easily frowned on by party leadership, especially when it produced a new Pacific port. Wenyuan’s star was in the ascendant.
Nevertheless, from that time on, Wenyuan favored a less flamboyant posture. To rise too far in isolation, lacking clearly identified and trustworthy allies, was to invite a sudden and permanent disappearance. After careful study of the alternatives, he chose to work to insinuate himself into Tai Chen’s inner circle. Her ambition seemed to match his own, and he judged her to lack a close advisor with his particular skills. She understood political power well, but lacked a grasp of the ways of force. If he could be useful to her, then in time she would be useful to him.
When Tai Chen went to Geneva, Wenyuan was not yet senior enough to be taken along. On her return, he read King William’s briefing book on the supposed alien spacecraft and found it laughable. It was always his suspicion that Tai Chen shared the same view. But whether she did or not, it was clear that she saw opportunities in the situation. And Wenyuan saw that by serving her interests, he might advance his own.
The ideal opportunity came when Tai Chen grew frustrated at Zhu Xuefan’s foot-dragging. Wenyuan gathered much of the ‘evidence’ used to justify the purge, had a major hand in its planning, and took it upon himself to personally lead the soldiers who arrested the premier.
Afterward, a grateful Tai Chen offered Wenyuan one of China’s two seats in the new Pangaean Assembly. But he saw quickly that for the foreseeable future, Rashuri meant for the Assembly’s role to be largely ornamental, a circus to televise to the people and keep them from wondering where the power really lay. He declined.
She then offered to make him her personal representative in New Delhi. Considering Rashuri’s early successes, that offer had some possibilities. But since the position had no formal standing in either government, Wenyuan considered it beneath his proper and earned station.
He did suggest Gu Qingfen, one of his lieutenants, be appointed instead, and did so in such a way that it seemed a minor favor, preserving the value of the promissary note he held.