Kevin Anderson - Resurrection, Inc.

“‘Religion is comparable to a childhood neurosis,’ Sigmund Freud said. And he was right.”

“Got it!” Vincent interrupted, turning away from the Net terminal. Nathans looked up at him, and Stromgaard regarded his son skeptically. Vincent continued, “It’s a little bit unexpected, though. It looks something like Satanism, in an updated form.”

He pointed to the screen and listed out the results of the relational search. “You want something that the people will find exciting, something that seems slightly forbidden, which I take to mean something dark . You’ll want it to be titillating, so throw in a little racy symbolism, some suggestive rituals, maybe even sex during the high ceremonies. And you want your deity to be bigger than life, very powerful but within reach—not some ethereal, all-pervading god spirit that never interferes in the affairs of mortals. We want an Old Testament-ish dictatorial entity that rewards the faithful but does all sorts of unpleasant things to unbelievers. Try the popular conception of Satan—it all fits.”

“Satanism…” Nathans pursed his lips, considering. “But placed in a modern context, a new Satanism. Neo-Satanism! I like the sound of that.”

Stromgaard looked as if he had been left out of the decision entirely, and was about to speak up when Vincent’s enthusiasm stopped him. “Let’s do it!”

Later. Much later.

As if from a great distance, Vincent looked down at the victim on the altar. The young woman—formerly a student, then turned activist, and then, for some unknown reason, suddenly a fanatic neo-Satanist—lay back in anticipation, naked except for the flimsy white robe, most assuredly not a virgin. She thrust her small, not quite rounded breasts up toward him as he stood in his black High Priest robes.

They hadn’t needed any drugs with her, no tranquilizing or disorienting substances to keep her quiet through the ceremony. She lay back, grinning a self-satisfied smile, without the slightest doubt on her face, absolutely confident in her beliefs.

Vincent could hardly keep the scorn from his face. Nathans was right—how could these people be so gullible?

The candles flickered; the incense made the underground room seem too stuffy, too perfumed. Sounds echoed in the large vault, making it seem like a vast, unpleasant womb. Not quite familiar with the High Sabbat ritual, some of the white-robed Acolytes continued the meaningless chant, following along in their printed program leaflets. Vincent ignored them.

Behind the altar, the “sacred relics” of neo-Satanism sat on display in separate transparent showcases. A black (plastic) claw torn from Satan’s finger when He turned his back on Heaven in disgust, deciding instead to come and look after mortals. Another relic: a blackened hoofprint burned into the linoleum when Satan had appeared in Wittenburg to make his famous bargain with Dr. Faustus in the sixteenth century (it didn’t seem to bother any of the converts that linoleum hadn’t been created until more than three centuries later). And a small vial of semen from when Satan had impregnated a twentieth-century woman named Rosemary.

Vincent dragged his gaze over the chanting crowd and prepared to strike. He raised the blade of the arthame over the naked woman’s chest. She cocked her head back, anticipating, distantly awed by what she expected to see.

“If you believe all that,” he couldn’t resist mumbling under his breath, not sure if she could hear him or if she was even listening, “then you’re brain dead already.”

He brought the blade down. It was always the same, and by now he had lost his revulsion, his guilt, and felt no sympathy at all for the victims, for people who would allow themselves to be so easily manipulated.

Vincent had considered it an elaborate joke at first, a game, a trick to play on the masses—but they were supposed to catch on, and everyone would laugh sheepishly and admit they’d been fooled. Yet to his horror, the people turned the tables on him—they had embraced neo-Satanism with all the fervor that The Net had predicted. It amazed him at first, and then appalled him.

Back at the beginning. Nathans tilted the chair, locking his fingers together behind his neck. He smiled to himself, and spoke aloud to Vincent, who was busily concocting “holy writings,” scribbling complex and nonsensical poetry on some artificially aged parchment.

“‘Man is insane. He wouldn’t know how to create a bacterium, and creates gods by the dozen.’ The French philosopher Montaigne wrote that.”

Vincent looked up from his writing. “You sure read a lot, Mr. Nathans.”

“No. I just memorize a good many quotes. That way it seems like I read a lot, when I don’t really have the time.”

Vincent rolled up the parchment, careful not to smear the ink. They planned on claiming that this particular scripture came from ancient Arabia, and he wondered how anyone would explain the existence of felt-tip pens in that far-flung land. Sadly, he doubted anyone would question it at all.

“I’ve been using The Net to do a lot of my researching for me,” Vincent said distractedly. “It’s funny some of the things that turned up. Did you know that Satan means ‘adversary’ in Hebrew? Yet Lucifer means ‘light bearer.’ That’s an odd contradiction, don’t you think?”

“Fit those details in. The more mysterious names and ancient-sounding words, the better.”

“I’ve even come up with a rationale for worshiping Satan,” he offered. “For instance, why waste your time worshiping a good god? If he’s truly good , then he’ll never do anything bad to you. You’re better off trying to keep the evil one happy, appease him with a few rituals and sacrifices, so he won’t harm you. You’re covered on both bases.”

“No, no, no!” Nathans stood up and went over to close the French windows against the gray fog outside. On his way back to the chair, he switched on the fireplace. “You don’t argue using concepts . You have to claim dogma and leave no room for rational thought. If someone challenges you with irrefutable logical arguments, you need only say ‘the Lord works in mysterious ways,’ or ‘all things are clear to those who have Faith.’”

They heard Stromgaard moving down the hall, going up the stairs, and then returning again to exit the front door without speaking to them. The elder Van Ryman had kept himself busy with the business details of forming the new religion, and left the philosophical discussions to Vincent and Nathans, who enjoyed them more.

Earlier, as they had all sat in front of the mirrored hearth, Nathans stressed the importance of ritual, how the proper gestures and repetitions were pivotal to a successful religion. The ritual had to be simple enough to be remembered easily, yet complex enough that one had to learn it, rather than mindlessly follow along. And it also had to have an air of mystique, a dark power behind it to lure the converts.

The elder Van Ryman had been in charge of contacting a professional choreographer, who helped them to design the elaborate rituals. The choreographer, a bitter woman who could no longer dance because a nerve disease had taken from her the precise use of her arms and legs, immediately took up the challenge and derived remarkable rituals based on, but not obviously evolved from, common religious ceremonies. The Black Mass, or the Sabbat, became a parody, an inverse of the Catholic Mass, with the worshipers reverently making the sign of the broken cross.

Although Nathans had specifically intended neo-Satanism to be Stromgaard’s bailiwick, the elder Van Ryman again proved his inadequacy. Vincent and Nathans had forged far ahead philosophically, but kept Stromgaard busy and distracted with a great deal of the nuts-and-bolts work. Confidentially Nathans had told Vincent how he hoped they could occupy Stromgaard long enough to get the religion formulated. After the major groundwork was properly completed, neo-Satanism could function by itself, even with someone like Stromgaard at the helm.