I fidgeted with my bow-tie, briefly delighted to realize it had come with me. Verily, my neuroses ran deep.
Sensing my unease, Andalon tugged at my shoulder. “What’s wrong, Mr. Genneth?”
I chuckled bitterly. “Other than the singing?” I asked. “Well… I’d like to think I’m a pretty good mind doctor,” I said, “but, having skills at the ‘talk down a terrorist’ level?” I shook my head. “That power only exists in movies and TV medical dramas.”
“What’s a ‘terrorist’?” Andalon asked.
Sighing again, I pinched the bridge of my nose, rubbing my fingers over my eyelids.
Kids say the darndest things, don’t they?
What the heck, I’ll give it a go.
“A terrorist is a person who chooses to hurt people—to scare them, even kill them—because they feel that’s the only way they’ll get what they want. They’re fond of bombs and guns and anything and everything that can quickly kill a lot of people.”
“That’s…” Andalon’s pale jaw went slack, “that’s horrible!”
I nodded, “Well,” I said, with a wry, acerbic smile, “maybe there is hope for you yet.”
“Why would Miss Leen be with such meanies?”
Holy Angel, He'll be drivin’, when she comes,
Holy Angel, He'll be drivin’ when she comes,
Holy Angel, He'll be drivin’, Holy Angel, He'll be drivin’,
Holy Angel, He'll be drivin’, when she comes.
I looked over my shoulder, pointing back at the mountains behind us. “I blame the mountains.”
Andalon looked at me in confusion. “But how could something so pretty make Miss Leen into a terror-rist?”
“Well… people don’t like feeling small,” I explained, “so they put themselves up on a pedestal, often with disastrous results.”
When the Second Crusades ended in failure and the dissolution of the First Trenton Empire, I imagine a lot of my ancient countrymen felt small, and hated it. They couldn’t stand the thought that they, the Godhead’s chosen, had been forsaken and condemned to failure, and, instead, concluded the fault lay with some malfeasants among them. Of course, when everyone thinks everyone else is a villain out to destroy them, internecine conflict is basically inevitable.
That was the Interregnum period in a nutshell. The Church’s unity was shattered. Splinter groups sprouted up like weeds, and often disappeared just as quickly, exterminated by better-organized opposition. Terror, desperation, and frenzied zealotry drove people to the unthinkable. And once that line was first crossed, it was only a matter of time before everyone followed.
People like the Innocents of Riscolt.
She'll be callin’ down the lightnin’ when she comes,
She'll be callin’ down the lightnin’ when she comes,
She'll be callin’ down the lightnin’ , she'll be be callin’ down the lightnin’ ,
She'll be callin’ down the lightnin’ when she comes.
They were an antinomian group. The collapse of the First Empire broke the people’s faith in the Church as an earthly institution. The many threads of Angelicalism emerged as a result of concerted critiques of the Church and calls for reform mounted by lower clergy and even the laïty. The Church’s Magisterium was the greatest point of contention. What counted as part of the Magisterium, and what was acquired and syncretized from foreign or pagan influence? To what extent were the Magisterium and the Church’s physical manifestations and worldly institutions bonafide parts of mankind’s Covenant with the Angel?
It took nearly two centuries for us to work through the details. The hard-fought consensus ended up being middle of the road. Some of the sacraments had been abused or misinterpreted, particularly Divulgence and the Inquisition. The relationship between Church and State was distanced, with the Investiture crisis being decidedly resolved in favor of the Church. Many of the strictest legalistic and ritualistic prescriptions were changed from compulsory to voluntary.
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Compared to the eventual compromise, Antinomians were one of the most notable fringe groups. They had the power of logic on their side, and all the concomitant dangers. If Primeval sin made man truly incapable of his own salvation, no human institutions could be entrusted with man’s spiritual fate. Scriptural exegesis was mere speculation. Liturgy and ritual were boastful vanities. Only the Angel could light the flames of virtue and righteousness inside the human heart. Laws and proscriptions had no power to determine virtue.
She'll be loaded with bright fires when she comes,
She'll be loaded with bright fires when she comes,
She'll be loaded with bright fires, she'll be loaded with bright fires,
She'll be loaded with bright fires when she comes.
They were exquisitely persecuted. Words fail to describe the horrors inflicted upon the Innocents. They’d earned the name because that was what they would shout “I am innocent! I am innocent!” as a purgative mantra while their entrails were unwound from their impaled, slit-open bellies. The largest group retreated to the Riscolts, driven into the mountains’ most inhospitable reaches by their diligent oppressors. Then, in 1332, Tchwang’s Mt. Su-Chen erupted, blanketing the world in a year without a summer. The winter that followed was unlike any other.
Starved, ostracized, and desperate, the Innocents descended into cannibalism. At first, they only ate the bodies of the soldiers sent to kill them. Then they ate one another. Parents fed their bodies to their children, that they might live.
Depending on who was in power, textbooks referred to them as either the Innocents of Riscolt or the Ghouls of Riscolt. The Second Empire called them Ghouls, because they would have opposed the Empire and the Church’s Resurrection. The First Republic called them Innocents, making them tragic victims of Church persecution. The Prelatory gave them measured praise, citing their rejection of “unjust law” as a way to justify the Prelate’s autocratic powers. Currently, they were called Ghouls, but more as a tragic descriptor than a base demonization. As for the cult Ileene had fallen in with—the Innocents of the Mountain? Well, they were an example of what kids these days would have called a ‘tribute band’, except they took the worst possible lessons from their predecessor, embracing both an authoritarian anti-authoritarianism and a fanatic opposition to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, though, to my knowledge, they had yet to stoop to cannibalism.
Yet.
She will answer the Great Question when she comes,
She will answer the Great Question when she comes,
She will answer the Great Question, she will answer the Great Question,
She will answer the Great Question when she comes.
From her words and from what I’d seen of her, Ileene seemed… ordinary. She was a story ripped from the headlines: well-to-do middle class kid gets radicalized, flees home to join fundamentalist group. Drastic turns like that sometimes made me worry that this whole “psychiatry” business wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. One of Brand’s favorite composers used to be Archer Vance. His music sounded like someone was torturing a pet animal to death—and not just any pet, but, specifically yours, and your favorite, at that. Then, one day, he completely quits the modern art world, grows his beard out down to his crotch, and lives in an anarcho-vegetarian commune out by Little Sis writing the cloying, heartbreaking, achingly beautiful music the TSPCA uses on its advertisements to get people to adopt an animal in need.
In all seriousness, though, I always chalked peripeteias like that up to our ineffably imperfect knowledge of how the world worked. If you really, truly wanted to understand how something worked, the best way—and, really, the only way—was to take it apart piece by piece to see what made it tick, and how, and why. You just couldn’t do that with people.
Well, you could, but you would be a monster.
Huh…
I dwelled on that thought.
“Perhaps I could…” I mumbled.
“Could what, Mr. Genneth?” Andalon asked.
I looked Andalon in the eyes, trying my best to ignore the singing. The transport bucked as it passed a nasty bump in the road.
“I was able to speak with the Ileene of the present in that void between her memories,” I said. “But, maybe I can speak to her in the middle of a memory, as well?”
Andalon crossed her arms and clasped them at the elbows. She stared at Ileene warily, even as the young woman sang and clapped along.
She will take us through the portals when she comes,
She will take us through the portals when she comes,
She will take us through the portals, she will take us through the portals,
She will take us through the portals when she comes.
“I,” Andalon shuddered, “I don’t want to talk to her. She’ll just yell and kick and hurt me all over again.”
“She probably would be very… combative…” I said, nodding in frustrated agreement.
But was that the only way? No. There had to be something I could do.
“Hmm…” I mumbled, thinking aloud, “maybe I don’t need to confront her. Maybe… I can see it for myself.”
I turned back to the group. They’d finished singing, and were laughing and winded, clapping enthusiastically. A few girls whistled; the sound pierced through the buffeting winds.
Where did your hopes go, Ileene Plotsky?
For a moment, I pictured something like a pair of curtains floating in the middle of the air. People drew defenses around themselves like curtains—lies, denials, fantasies.
I wonder…
Knowing the dream-logic that ruled this memory-world, perhaps what I needed now was a bit of make-believe. If I could make the young woman’s mental defenses into something palpable, maybe that would lead me into the secrets of her psyche.
On a whim, I raised my hands to where I pictured the curtains’ edges were. To my surprise, my hand brushed against something solid. I froze for a moment, hesitating.
There was no telling where I’d end up if I pushed forward, and there was no guarantee that I wasn’t free from danger.
“If you think it, you can do it!” Andalon said.
Nodding, I muttered her words under my breath. “If I think it, I can do it.”
Then steadying my fingers, I tried again. It was like the air parted. The space around me collapsed, wrinkling to either side just like curtains. And then Andalon and I found ourselves standing somewhere else.