Paul Hardy - The Last Man on Earth Club

Kwame didn’t like the idea. “What precisely do we have to talk about?”

“I’ve got a complaint,” said Olivia. “He screams at night. I can’t get any sleep.”

“I have nightmares,” said Kwame.

“We’ve all got bloody nightmares. You’re the only one that screams.”

“Olivia,” I said, “this isn’t a forum for complaints. I’d prefer it if we could have a civilised discussion.”

“Well, what about?” she demanded. “He’s right, none of us have anything in common! You say we all survived the end of the world but it’s different worlds! Half of us don’t even speak the same language! I’m fed up reading subtitles all the time.”

“I’ve started learning Interversal,” said Iokan. “You could help the rest of us catch up with you, if you like.”

“I would rather not,” said Kwame.

“Well… it’s something we share, isn’t it?” said Iokan. “All of you who’ve been here for a while had to learn Interversal. And those of us who are new need to pick up the language…”

“It is not that…” said Kwame, too slowly to prevent Pew joining in.

“I can help,” he said. “I did a bit of teaching at the university—”

“ Please . Let me finish,” said Kwame.

“Oh. Sorry…” said Pew, looking embarrassed.

“I had great difficulty learning to speak again after my hibernation. And thinking about it gives me a headache. So I would rather not.”

“Ah,” said Iokan. “Okay, we could just talk about something. We can pick a subject, right?”

“I can count the ways you’re off your rocker,” suggested Olivia.

Iokan looked back at her for a moment. Not offended, but pitying her a little. Then he smiled. “Okay. If that’s what you want.” He waited for her to frown.

“What do you mean?” she said.

“Let’s discuss the thing about me you don’t like.”

“There’s nothing about you I like.”

“There’s one thing in particular.”

“Yeh. Everything that comes out of your mouth.”

“I meant religion.”

“As much as I dislike agreeing with Olivia,” said Kwame, “she has a point. Nothing else comes out of your mouth.”

“If you’re tired of my point of view, why not present your own?” said Iokan.

“There is nothing worth saying,” said Kwame.

“Religion may be a rather difficult subject for today,” I said. “Does anyone else have any ideas?”

“No, I don’t mean ‘let’s have a debate about what’s real and what isn’t’,” said Iokan. “I mean… you can tell a lot about a society by how it worships, or how it doesn’t. For example, the IU doesn’t officially recognise religion, so we know they’re interested in the physical world rather than the spiritual. But they don’t stop people worshipping if they want to, so we also know they’re tolerant of people who are different. Which suggests they take morality seriously. And without religion, they have to take their morality from their own conscience. So perhaps they respect human life more than some religions do. The problem comes when they have to choose between two bad options; they don’t want to hurt anyone, so they often do nothing, which can end up hurting everyone.”

“That’s an… interesting analysis,” I said.

“But you see the point?” said Iokan. “We don’t understand each other. But if we talk about how we worship, we’ll learn something about each other.”

I considered it for a moment. It was actually a good idea. Olivia butted in. “Rubbish,” she said.

“I think Iokan’s got a point,” I said. “Were you ever religious?”

She snorted. “You must be joking. The only thing you get from religion is rot. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Not even just to tell us how your religion was set up? What kind of gods you had?”

“It’s all rot. Nothing but rot.”

“So you’re an atheist?” asked Iokan.

She gave him a hard look. “All right. If you’re so bloody desperate to know. Those priests you want to hear about, those good kind, moral people,” she said, spitting out the words, “they said revenants were dead souls from Tartarys. So in the first outbreak, they’d get them into a temple and worship them, like they’re messengers from Plutos. And then they let the revenants bite them, can you believe! All the wounds got infected and most of them died and got up again — more bloody revenants. And the ones that were still alive would worship them , like they’d been to Tartarys and come back with a message from high and mighty himself. And we didn’t know this was going on because we were out in the countryside searching for more of the bastards. Right when it was ending, I mean when the first outbreak was ending (gods only know what they did in the last outbreak), we found out they’d locked the temple doors. There was one temple school that kept all the children inside. All of them died and came back. Disgusting. We had to quarantine the temples until we could go in and put them down one by one. They had us go in there and shoot children because they wouldn’t let us burn the place down, that would be disrespectful to the gods, wouldn’t it?” She shook her head at it all. “So don’t tell me religion does any good.”

“Olivia is correct,” said Katie. Everyone turned to look at her. I think a lot of them had forgotten what her voice sounded like.

“Katie? Do you have something to add?” I asked. She looked at me.

“Religion can be used to justify any atrocity. My enemies sustained their society with a religion of hatred and revenge. They re-edited every video file from the Second Machine War to prove we were evil and fought a holy war with no diplomacy. Their soldiers would not surrender when defeated. They would not accept our surrender at the end of the war. Their religion was an excuse for genocide.”

No one knew what to say, until Iokan broke in. “Is that all religion was used for on your world?”

“That was the primary purpose: the justification of criminal activity.”

“Hah! You see?” exclaimed Olivia to Iokan, but he hid his irritation.

“The Soo were the same,” muttered Pew. He looked up, a little surprised as everyone looked at him. “Well, they… they had lots of religions. But they all said the same thing about us.”

“What was that?” I asked.

“We were destined to be slaves. Or god created us as slaves. Or one said that anyone that couldn’t look after themselves deserved to be slaves. Or we didn’t have souls, so it was okay to enslave us because we didn’t really feel pain. They were all the same. It just gave them an excuse to do whatever they wanted with us.”

“Did you have a religion of your own? Before you were captured?” asked Iokan.

“That was different,” said Pew. “It wasn’t… we didn’t really have a religion. Not like the Soo did.”

“But you had some kind of spirituality?”

Pew smiled, just a little. “Spirituality. Yeah. Something like that. Lots of spirits. The Polar Bear had a spirit. The Beluga had a spirit. Storms were spirits.”

“So a kind of… primitive animism?”

Pew’s smile vanished. “…Yeah. I suppose you’d call it that. We did all those things you see in anthropology videos. Like saying sorry to the seal because you killed it. Praying to the spirit of the spear so it’d fly true. Putting the dead under the ice where all the spirits were.” He grew bitter. “Do you know what else we thought was a spirit? Illness. It was called Ikti. Ikti opened the tent flap for Akkikit. That was death. Maybe if we hadn’t been primitive animists we’d have known about germs and we wouldn’t have died.”

“I didn’t mean to imply anything—” protested Iokan.