The purity plot, p.5
The Purity Plot, page 5
When their ship landed on Purity, Pias and Yvette dressed themselves in native clothes and prepared to disembark. Both wore heavy ecru shirts that itched unbearably, made of the fiber of some native plants. Pias had on dark brown pants, of a different fabric but equally itchy, while Yvette was clad in a plain brown skirt that reached to the floor. And both were shod in thick brown boots made of the toughened leather of some local animal. To enhance the suffering, Puritans eschewed the use of underwear or socks; no coats, cloaks or hoods were worn, either, despite the bitter temperatures. That would have been too "soft" for Puritan standards.
Inside the terminal, Pias glanced around at the crowds of people dressed similarly to Yvette and himself. Nowhere did he see a smile, a twinkling eye, or any sign of human warmth. "Dullness never goes out of fashion here, does it?" he asked, dismayed despite the fact that he had expected no better after what he'd read.
"You should see them when they aren't all dressed up," Yvette replied.
They found accommodations easily enough, a small boardinghouse near the center of God's Will City, the capital of Purity. Their room was small and sparsely furnished; the cracked plaster walls were bare of any adornment except a small stitched sampler in a cracked frame, admonishing them that sacrifice was the road to Heaven. There was one bed, just barely wide enough for the two of them, with crisp, white sheets and tiny wooden blocks to serve as pillows; a plainly carved bantawood chair; and a small writing desk on which lay, naturally enough, a copy of the Puritan Bible.
Pias sat down hard on the bed and immediately regretted the action. "Ow!" he exclaimed, rubbing his posterior. "That bed wasn't manufactured, it was sculpted from the native rock. We might do better sleeping on the floor."
Yvette sat down more easily on the bed. "Nonsense. It'll be good for your back."
"How do we turn on the heat in here?"
Yvette looked around, but could see no sign of a control switch. "I don't think we're supposed to. It wouldn't be good for our souls if we were comfortable."
Pias made a face and Yvette laughed. "Really, darling," she said, "one would think you'd never suffered before."
"I thought I had, until I came here."
Even the food was not to his liking. The boardinghouse served only two meals a day, morning and evening. Their dinner that night consisted of a bowl of cold stew and bread. They were permitted all the water they could drink. "Was that bread meant to be eaten," Pias complained afterward, as they lay together on the bed, "or is that what they use for throwing at sinners?"
"Nobody ever told you the job of being a secret agent was a glamorous one."
"I'll have to see what I can do to rectify that," Pias grumbled, but would not elucidate further.
The SOTE agents spent the next three days learning their way around the city and picking up the Puritan customs. Purity was not an urbanized world; the Puritans felt that being close to nature enabled them to be closer to God, and they had structured their society as a collection of small farms. Even the largest urban centers, such as God's Will City, had populations of fewer than five thousand people.
Life dragged by at a slow pace on Purity. Most Puritans thought it decadent, if not outright sinful, to travel in mechanized vehicles; there were some groundcars, aircars, and copiers available for use by offworlders doing business here, but the vast majority of street traffic was either on foot or in carts drawn by eight-legged local beasts. Shops along the street presented no glittering displays, no fancy advertisements, just the name of the proprietor and the goods sold or services performed.
It was Yvette who first remarked on the pattern of the services offered. By the second day she had noted that approximately one establishment out of every five was concerned with religion in some way, either selling religious articles or, even more prevalent, offering religious counsel or. guidance. After Yvette's observation, they paid closer attention to those details and, in the privacy of their room, discussed the matter.
"It seems to be a matter of cultural anxiety," Pias remarked. "It's already well-known that the Puritans consider themselves better than anyone else in the galaxy. There may be something in their collective psyche, some compulsion to feel superior to others."
"And in that case," Yvette said, picking up on his train of thought, "they wouldn't necessarily stop at their own borders. Everyone on the planet will be engaged in his own personal battle to be superior to his neighbors."
Pias nodded. "Exactly. We have a planet where everyone is straining to be holier than thou." "'Straining' is a very apt word. That state of affairs is impossible for any sane person to maintain for very long. Everyone, no matter how sincere his or her beliefs, no matter how devoted to moral principles, everyone experiences little moments of doubt now and then; anything else would not be human. But doubt is not allowed on Purity; to let any of it show would be admitting that you were less religious than the people around you, and therefore inferior."
"Hence," Pias concluded, "the religious counselors. I suspect they fulfill the dual role of father-confessor and psychiatrist. They listen to people's doubts and then rationalize them away; they soothe the minds of their clients so that the Puritans can once again feel perfectly devout. Every society needs something of the sort, to reconcile people's imperfections with their ideal images of themselves; the more obsessed the society is with perfection, the more reconciliation it will need." He sighed. "And this is the most obsessive society I've ever seen."
The closer they examined life on Purity, the more they observed this principle in action. Technically, Purity was governed under the rules of hereditary aristocracy as set forth in the Stanley Doctrine. But the Puritan religious philosophy taught people that names and titles in this life were meaningless in terms of salvation. As a result, the official nobility of the planet received only lip service, enough to satisfy the demands of the Empire; the people who were truly respected, who had the most political power and who actually ran this world were the religious counselors. The successful ones had large followings, their teachings were followed and their advice was quoted most often. They were not preachers, exactly--the Puritans had no formal clergy--but they were the advisers to the nobles and the people who were most often heeded.
For their third night on Purity, the Bavols attended a public "exhortation" by Tresa Clunard, one of the most powerful counselors on Purity, and, according to Marask Kantana's report, the person responsible for the Army of the Just that they were here to investigate. They both decided it was time they looked upon the face of the enemy, and Tresa Clunard had just returned to God's Will City, after a successful speaking tour through the smaller farming communities.
The town meeting hall was packed solid when they showed up, even though they had taken care to arrive half an hour early. Pies and Yvette elbowed their way inside, found standing room against one wall, and waited with the rest for the spectacle to begin. There was a buzzing throughout the auditorium that was the closest thing either of them had seen to excitement since their arrival on Purity. As the lights dimmed, a hush of expectation overtook the crowd.
The first figure out on stage was Elspeth FitzHugh, the counselor's top aide and administrative assistant. FitzHugh opened the proceedings with an invocation, and then passed bowls around, making a short appeal for contributions to the cause. Then, when the people's enthusiasm was reaching a peak, she introduced Tresa Clunard.
The stage went completely dark for fifteen seconds, heightening the feeling of anticipation still further. Then slowly a spotlight came on, illuminating the figure standing silently at stage center. Gospozha Clunard was not a young woman-middle to late forties, Yvette would have guessed-but she possessed a quiet self-confidence that radiated a special kind of beauty all its own to the audience. Her long, blonde hair was fastened into a single braid down her back, extending as far as her waist. She wore a floor-length, dark brown robe that was both severe and elegant at the same time.
Clunard was an experienced performer, and had her timing down perfectly. She waited until the spotlight had opened to maximum intensity before she began her exhortation. Bowing her head slightly to the crowd, she finally began to speak.
"Brothers and sisters, I am gratified to look out upon you and see so many worthy faces. When I think of all the evil, sin, and corruption that is infesting our galaxy, I sometimes despair for the future of mankind; but when I can see the faces of so many good and deserving people like yourselves, I am filled once more with the strength of purpose which God, in His infinite wisdom, has chosen to bestow on me. And I rise up again, my faith renewed a dozenfold.
"For there is evil out there among the worlds, brothers and sisters. There is a sickness stalking the planets. There is degradation, decadence, and eternal damnation swallowing up humanity even as we sit here. The enemies of God are many, and their wiles are devious. Their goal is the total damnation of every living human soul-and they are winning, brothers and sisters. They are winning."
The audience was dead calm despite the intensity of Clunard's speech. To the SOTE team, it seemed as though the listeners were engaged in a contest to see who could avoid reacting for the longest time. Clunard paused for dramatic effect, then continued.
"We remain here in our own enclave of piety and we think that, because we obey the Lord's commandments and live according to His wishes, we are safe from the evil that will overtake the rest of our fellow men. We think that our devotion to the word of God will give us immunity in the holocaust to come. We think our godliness will ensure our salvation, no matter what happens to everyone else.
"Brothers and sisters, we are only fooling ourselves. These conceits are a delusion perpetrated by the very evil we think we are avoiding. When that final battle comes, there will be no sanctuary; the flood will be of such monumental proportions that there will be no safe islands on which to hide. The magnitude of the evil is so great, brothers and sisters, that we will be swallowed up as if we never existed. All our struggles, all our good works will come to nought. God will turn His eyes from us, cast us into the fiery pit of hell with all the other sinners for our failure in our holy mission to bring His word and His way to the rest of the galaxy."
One woman cried out, and drew immediate stares of rebuke from the people around her. She sank lower in her seat, and attention returned to the stage.
"Out there on other worlds, mankind has abandoned its divine heritage, turned its back on salvation, and lost itself in godless decadence. Machines make the decisions, machines till the farms, machines run the factories and produce all the goods that keep the people in their soft life-style. Every day, thousands of souls are being lost to the machines-and as the people get weaker, the machines get stronger.
"By remaining here on Purity and ignoring the rest of mankind, we are ignoring as well our divine duty to God. We can no longer sit idly by and let the forces of evil devour the universe. We live in a time for action, and the person who sits on his hands, no matter how pure his heart, no matter how deep his devotion to God, that person is as much a sinner as the vilest indulger in the appetites of the flesh.
"We can no longer deny that we are our brothers' and our sisters' keepers. We must go forth. We must scourge the Empire of sin. We must abandon our safe, sin-free world and carry our battle to the fleshpots of the decadent majority. Only by knowing the enemy face-to-face can we ever hope to achieve the victory that God has intended for us."
She came to another significant pause, and gave her listeners, as well as herself, a chance to catch their breath. She knew she had reached an emotional peak, and she would be accelerating on the downhill side from here on.
"I know what you're saying to yourselves right now. You're saying, I am one and they are many.' You're saying, 'How can a person like me, the humblest, most sinful creature God ever made, fight against the monstrous forces of evil?' You're saying, Evil is the trickiest enemy man ever fought. We have no chance against it on its own territory, we can only hope to fight it within ourselves.'
"But I say to you that if you listen to such thoughts, then you are being seduced by one of evil's ablest lieutenants-despair. Yes, we are few in numbers; yes, we are poor sinners like the souls we are trying to save; yes, the enemy has more weapons, both physical and psychological, than the human mind can comprehend. But we are not powerless. We have the greatest force any person could hope to have on our side. We have our belief. We have our faith. We have God. His strength is beyond our imagining. His wisdom surpasses all knowledge. If we keep our cause pure and our faith intact, then God will be with us and we cannot lose."
At this point she started to move, taking a dozen steps to her left. The spotlight followed her until she stopped beside a metal bar that was the only prop on the stage. "There are some among you," Clunard said, "for whom words alone are insufficient inducement. You need a demonstration of the powers God can give to those who truly believe, who are filled with faith and love for Him. I do not enjoy resorting to theatrical tricks, but I will use all the methods God puts at my disposal to win new converts to His glorious army.
"I have here a bar of ribadium-reinforced structural steel. The bar is fifty centimeters long, ten centimeters thick and masses about twelve kilograms. To those of you who say that our enemy is too tough, let me offer an example of the power that God may grant His servants."
Tresa Clunard took the bar between her hands and closed her eyes. Her face took on a look of beatific innocence, an expression of supreme self-confidence. The audience was completely still, waiting in awe for the expected miracle to occur. There was a glow that spread from Clunard's face and hands, a feeling of power that radiated from the stage and over the audience, covering the crowd like a blanket of peace.
All eyes were on the bar. For a moment it seemed to glow with an incandescence that would surely have burned the counselor's hands if it were real. Clunard's wrists were twisting slowly in opposite directions, but her face showed no outward signs of strain. The heavy, metal bar was giving way to her pull like a stick of taffy left out in the sun until she had given it a full twist; then, without changing expression, she bent the bar upward into a U-shape. Opening her eyes again and gazing at her handiwork, Clunard tossed the bar aside with a casual gesture. Falling at the three-gee acceleration of Purity, the bar hit the heavy wooden floor of the stage with a dull clank that reverberated through the crowded hall.
Yvette watched the act. with great interest. As a performer herself, she appreciated a good show, and could not help wondering how it was done. The glow, she assumed, could be managed by any skilled lighting technician, but the bar was another matter. She had relatives who were weight lifters and wrestlers, any of whom were easily capable of such a feat; but all of them massed upwards of 120 kilos, and their muscles were so developed that it was impossible to mistake them for anything but what they were. Tresa Clunard, on the other hand, could scarcely have massed more than eighty kilos, if that much (it was hard to tell under the loose robe) and did not look at all muscle-bound. She had not had to strain to twist the bar. If the stunt had not been rigged in some way, she was very impressed with what Tresa Clunard could do. Perhaps a little too impressed; an idea began forming in the back of her mind that she did not like at all.
The audience could not help but gasp at the feat, and Tresa Clunard accepted it quietly, even seemed to expect it as her due. She gazed out over the darkened hall, and it appeared her eyes were making contact with every individual in the room. She looked as though she could measure the exact value of each soul and give change where required.
"That," she said when her audience had again grown still, "is a sample of the power that the Lord can invest in one of His children who truly believes in Him and loves Him. With a legion of true believers behind it, can any holy cause possibly fail?"
The counselor continued speaking for another half hour. She identified "the enemy" as the forces of materialism: wealth, labor-saving machines, the desire for easy living, anything that would concentrate a person's mind on the present life and make him forget his obligations toward the next. She spoke in general terms about gathering the faithful together to fight the corruption throughout the galaxy. Not once did she ever mention the Army of the Just by name, nor did she say the slightest word about raising arms against the established government. She was much too shrewd for that.
By the time her exhortation was finished, the tension within the hall was a tangible commodity, a violin string stretched taut and ready for bowing. And yet, aside from the general outburst of amazement when the bar was bent, the audience sat through the entire speech in stony silence. It's like talking to zombies, Yvette thought, and a chill rose up her spine.
As Clunard finished, the spotlight went out, leaving the auditorium momentarily in darkness. People who hadn't realized they were holding their breath began to breathe again, and there was the slight rustling of people shifting in their seats.
Then the houselights came on again, and Elspeth FitzHugh stood on the stage. She waited patiently for the crowd to regain its composure and made another appeal for donations to the cause. This time as the bowls were passed the rubles flowed like a river during the spring thaw. While the money was being collected, FitzHugh made slightly more direct references to an army being assembled to fight for God's cause, although her remarks were still general enough to avoid charges of treason.
With the closing benediction, the meeting was officially at an end. Not many people left the building, though. A majority surged forward toward the stage, eager to be a part of the magic they had sampled earlier. FitzHugh was mobbed by people anxious to learn how they could do more to personally assist Tresa Clunard's cause and, after a short discussion with Yvette, Pias joined that throng.
At last his turn came, and he spoke directly to the counselor's assistant. "I made a large contribution to the cause, Sister Elspeth," he said, "but I really don't feel that was enough for me to do. I want to become personally involved in Sister Tresa's work."
