Eric Flint: Time spike

Brian's sermons focused on the love of God and Jesus, and came with the man's natural ebullience and goodwill. It was hard to imagine anything more remote from the spirit that had filled the stern churches of the old Puritan colonists. You'd never hear Brian Carmichael describing the streets of hell paved with the skulls of unbaptized children, the way Cotton Mather had. Carmichael barely talked about hell at all. The devil simply didn't interest him. The man was odd, that way. As was about to be demonstrated again today.

The same Brian Carmichael who would insist that the Quiver was God's way of demonstrating the falseness of the doctrine of evolution-the logic there was enough to make a pretzel shriek in agony-and could recite, literally, chapter and verse from the Bible, simply didn't seem to care about the way people filled his teachings, exactly. As long as they did it in what he considered a Christian spirit-which, for him, ran heavily toward love of fellow man and spent little time at all scolding that same fellow man for his failings-and were willing to follow a few "basic rules," he was satisfied. Even the transparently idolatrous aspects of the way most villagers interpreted his teachings was something he was willing to ignore. It turned out the effigies and carvings the villagers paraded around with on holy days and religious festivals weren'treally icons-much less papist saints-they were actually "symbols of upright folk." So spake Brian Carmichael, anyway. And since he was the prophet, in the Cretaceous, who was going to argue the point? The sermon done, Elaine would trot out and start the singing, and within two minutes the entire congregation was joining in. On their feet, clapping and dancing-and using musical instruments upon which were often carved representations of the same "upright folk." Andy had come to the conclusion that he could live with the quirks. Like Rod, holding his nose sometimes.

Because he was pretty sure, now, that every sermon that went by, every raucous and happy congregation, was another little trickle slowly undermining the cultures around them, where they needed to be undermined, and cementing them where they needed that instead.

Carmichael's church was growing rapidly, much more rapidly than any other denomination, and by now most of its adherents came from the many Indian villages in the Quiver Zone. And some of those converts, starting about three months ago, were coming from Cahokia. Or, at least, from the villages around it and under Cahokia's rule. Andy realized that, in a century or two, his descendants might have to deal with another theocracy. But at least that one wouldn't practice human sacrifice-and, in the meantime, Andy was pretty sure that within a few years Carmichael's missionaries would make a war with the Cahokians something of a moot point. Those damn priests of theirs, with their sacrificial rites, were more likely to be overthrown from within.

"Istill can't figure out why they're doing it," Rod said, after they left the walls of Schulerville-which, in its own peculiar way, had become another factor undermining the priestly caste that dominated Cahokia. Sure, their mounds were impressive. But the walls and towers of a town that had once, in another universe, been a maximum security prison, were a hell of a lot more impressive. Even if the architects who'd designed it so long ago would be astonished to hear the news.

The new murals helped a lot, of course. They'd turned the once bleak and grim walls of Alexander into something extremely colorful and vivid. And if the origins of those intricate and fascinating designs were gang symbols, who cared? Certainly not the villagers who came to stare in wonder. The prison gangs still existed, in a way. But given that Luff had slaughtered all the gang leaders, and everything else that had happened-not to mention that Cook's rule in Boom Town could get very iron-fisted if anyone really provoked something-their competition had wound up taking a predominantly artistic form. The gangs were really more in the way of competing art schools, now. Each one got part of the walls assigned to it, which they kept painting over to match some new challenge. They pretty much had to do that anyway, of course. Schulerville's paint stocks were too limited to turn over to them, so they had to make do with what Susan Fisher and some of the villagers came up with. The colors were usually bright, albeit the range was limited-but the paints didn't last too long, either. And if the competition got pretty rough, sometimes, well… so had the streets of Oxford and Cambridge and the area around the Sorbonne in Paris, in centuries gone by. "AndI don't understand why you can't figure it out, Rod," said Jenny. "What's so complicated? They're bound and determined to get their orphanage up and running, and to do that they need to get Brian's approval. Every orphan around is from a village. The Cherokees take care of their own, and we don't have any because-so far-we've only got a total of one kid. Kathleen Hanrahan's boy, who'll grow up Cherokee anyway. Now that Kathleen moved in with Geoffrey." The Cherokee chief looked a bit smug. "We get along quite well, too. It's nice having a woman again. I think we may even get married, after a while." Cherokee marital customs were a lot looser than anything Carmichael liked. But it didn't matter, since only one Cherokee had ever joined his church and it was unlikely there'd be any more coming. That Cherokee had been considered more or less the town idiot. The Cherokees remained patient with Brian and his missionaries, but that style of Christianity just wasn't what suited them. Jenny looked back at Rod. "Don't you understand? The orphans will have to be village kids-and who gets them first? Brian, that's who. They just wander in on their own, or people who find them drop them in front of the church, not knowing what else to do. Give Brian a month, and they're budding little church members who accept his authority." "Fine. But-" "Butwhat? They're just being practical about it. Brian insists that any orphanage has to be run by a married couple, or it isn't respectable enough for him to be willing to turn any kids over to their care. And a marriage is something that can only happen between a man and a woman. One of the basic rules.

Period. You know Brian. As long as people follow the rules, and he likes what they're doing for other people, he's not going to question their own purposes and private intent. As he puts it maybe eight times a day, judgment is the Lord's, not his." "I still think it's nuts." So did Andy, in a way. But he couldn't deny that there was a certain charm to the whole thing, too. "We are gathered here, dearly beloved-" You had to hand it to Brian Carmichael. He didn't so much as blink. Not once, all the way through the ceremony. Sinners they might be, but they'd followed the rules. Judgment belonged to the Lord, not him. Geoffrey Kidd, at least, wore a jacket that covered most of his tattoos. He'd even worn gloves, to cover the tattoos on his knuckles.

In fact, he almost looked like a respectable groom. Bird Matthews, on the other hand, while she'd finally been willing to bend to the letter of Carmichael's rules, wasn't about to let him get away with the spirit. So, sure enough, she wore the jacket to her wedding. Dykes on Bikes. At the reception afterward, Andy couldn't resist trying to tease Kidd a bit. "So. Tell me. Are you looking forward to the wedding night with any trepidation or anxieties? Most newlyweds do." " 'Course not. The orphanage has separate bedrooms for husband and wife. The kind of modest and proper living arrangements you ain't seen in a century, almost." Kidd glanced to the side. "You won't see Bird and me watching each other like hawks, the way those two do. Even though neither one of them has the slightest reason for it. There's never even been a trace of gossip." Andy looked over. James and Elaine Cook were chatting with Marie Keehn, each with an arm around the other. You might have been able to get a crowbar between the two of them, if you were willing to spend some time at it and sweat a lot. "Nope," Kidd went on. "You watch and see. This will be the most troublesome-free marriage in the Zone. Who knows? We may even set a trend." "Dinosaur stakes," Andy muttered. "What was that?" "Nothing. I was just reflecting on wasted effort." Kidd grinned, as only he could. "You mean like trying to needle a reformed serial killer? In the Cretaceous ?" "Like I said. Wasted effort."