Kate Wilhelm - Let the Fire Fall

Lorna laughed and kissed him quickly, then looped her arm through Lisa’s and they walked together ahead of Matt and Derek. Derek was grinning broadly. “Boy, she’s worse if anything.”

Suddenly Matt stopped, and her suitcase dropped from his hand. Quickly he grasped it again and continued before anyone even noticed. He had just realized what he was looking at: Lorna’s hair. Beautiful golden hair that caught the sun and reflected it in a thousand bursts of fiery red light, hair that bounced and was brilliant and loose and half way down her back.

“WHY do you care what I believe? It’s none of your business!” That was Derek, to Lorna.

“It’s everyone’s business now. When the aliens return we have to present them with a solid front. We have to be united in our own beliefs. We have to be prepared to destroy them all before they have a chance to overcome Earth.” Lorna to Derek.

“You’ve gone right off your nut! You talk like a series of posters!”

“What about the Star Child? What about him?”

“What about him? I don’t know what you’re talking about. You hop around like a hungry flea in a litter of pups.”

“We were warned that he had to be given a religious education, taught about our God, our beliefs, and what have we done? We have given him to the U.N., a bunch of Communists and atheists. We were warned and we did nothing!”

“By whom? Your bearded illiterate? Good God, Lorna….”

She gasped and blanched and quickly clamped her hand over her own mouth as if to deny the words.

“Now what?” Derek was leaning across the dinner table staring at her, unmindful of the chicken and mushrooms in white wine sauce, unheeding of the salad bowl heaped with mixed greens and dotted lavishly with blue cheese.

“You mustn’t say that. It’s blasphemy. If anyone hears you they’ll beat you….”

“Good God! Good God! Good God! Good God….”

Lorna fled, her food untasted on her plate. Derek pushed his own plate back and stared after her. “She’s gone crazy. What did they do to her?”

Lisa, looking at the food. that she had struggled so hard to find and bring home, concentrated on not weeping.

“Young man, you go fetch your sister back to the table and if either of you starts on the Voice of God Church again, I’ll do the beating. Now scat!”

Lorna allowed herself to be brought back, but she refused to look at Derek, and she was silent through the main course. They talked of the weather, and Lorna started to speak, but bit her lips instead and picked at her salad. Obie had predicted another year of drought.

“They’ve known for twenty years or more that the cities have caused the weather changes,” Derek said. “The cloud cover, seeding with dust particles, the great heat output of the cities, that’s what it takes, you know. Everything gets sucked up and dumped out again over the cooler oceans. It isn’t a question of how to alleviate it, but rather why don’t they take the steps.”

“Break up the cities?” Lisa murmured.

“What else?”

“There was a time when we could do that, but now? I don’t think so,” Matt said. “No water inland, all crops, no industry….”

“Brother Cox says—”

“Oh, shut up,” Derek interrupted.

The talk turned to the world situation and the heavy demands of the draft to maintain the forces throughout South America, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. Matt was bitter about it, Derek resigned, and again Lorna looked as if she would like to explain, or comment, and again she didn’t. Obie had predicted an ever increasing need for men to patrol the world in order to keep the raw materials flowing into the bottomless pit that the space programs had created, and to keep the people from whose country they flowed quiet if not happy. Obie predicted also that it was futile, that those people were God-fearing people and the day was at hand when they would rise up and slay the non-believers stripping their lands for a project foredoomed to fail. The Voice of God Church sponsored, outfitted, and supplied guerrilla missionaries all over the world; outlawed by most governments, refused travel cards and credit cards, the Church provided its own credit, its own travel facilities, and no one knew how many of the zealots it had sent out, or where they had gone.

“The trouble is,” Lisa had complained once to Matt, “that if you believe in anything that Obie had condoned, you are forced to doubt your own beliefs. Can I really believe in anything that the Voice of God Church believes in? It doesn’t seem possible.”

They had cake and champagne, there were two bottles, so they all got rather giddy and happy and took their glasses to the living room where they laughed at old times and made elaborate toasts to Derek. It turned into a birthday party after all. Until the Savers arrived at eleven.”

Lorna wanted to let them in, to prove to her family that they weren’t monsters. When she was refused, she said she would go out and join them, and Matt assumed the role that he had used only once or twice in his life, that of the heavy-handed father, lord, master of the house. He couldn’t permit her to leave. Lorna stood up and started for the door, and he got in front of it. She stopped and stared at him with unbelieving eyes.

“You always said that we had to decide for ourselves. I decided. I believe in Brother Cox and what he is doing. I am a member of the Voice of God Church, I am working for it this summer and I’ll go to its school in the fall. Let me go out. They don’t know someone is inside who belongs. They’ll go away when they know your daughter is a member of the Church.”

“Wait,” Matt said. “Listen first.”

The hymn ended and the voice of the Messenger was there in the room with them. “There is no salvation outside the Church. There is no life outside the Church. All outside the Church are dead already. Accept salvation now and forever. Come to the Voice of God Church and be born again in the strength and the power and the might of the Lord.”

Lorna’s head was cocked slightly to the left as she listened raptly with her eyes half closed. She smiled at Matt when the voice ceased. “Isn’t it exciting!” she said. “The Voice of God can go anywhere, be heard through any walls, over anything else. Brother Cox heard the Voice of God years ago, and now the gift has been given to all the members. We can hear the Voice of God anytime.”

Derek snorted. “Gift! You pay an electronics expert enough and you too can become the Voice of God. Gift!”

Lorna drifted away from the door. The Savers were gone now, there was no longer any issue of going out or staying in. She said, very serenely, “People like you always scoff. You can’t accept the transcendent. If you can’t weigh and measure it, tear it apart and put it together again, reproduce it at will, you refuse to accept it no matter how many witnesses there are. Like when Blake was with Brother Cox healing….” She stopped and looked quickly at Lisa, who had become very pale.

“Have you seen him?”

“No. I don’t know where he is. No one will say. But they have films and photographs, and there is a Blake Daniels Cox Meditation Room at the headquarters in Mount Laurel, where I work now. He is a healer, Dad. I saw the films and talked to some of the people he healed. They aren’t mistaken.”

Matt shook his head. Ten years ago he thought this issue had been settled. But Lorna had been a child, eight, nine years old. She must remember the discussions they had had about this very thing. She and Derek had laughed at the idea of Blake’s having healing powers then. What had happened?

He said, “It’s nearly midnight, honey. Let’s get some sleep. I have to be at my office by eight in the morning, but I’ll be home from noon on and I’m off the next day, and there’ll be time to talk. Okay?”