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“Who are you?” asked Diana Philomel. I sighed. It was a difficult question to answer honestly. “John Keats,” I said at last.
Sol’s gaze was level. “And the last of your sins?” “Besides pride?” said Duré. “The greatest of my sins was falsifying data from a seven-year dig on Armaghast. Trying to provide a connection between the vanished Arch Builders there and a form of proto-Christianity. It did not exist. I fudged data. So the irony is, the greatest of my sins, at least in the Church’s eyes, was to violate the scientific method. In her final days, the Church can accept theological heresy but can brook no tampering with the protocols of science.”
“You think that the Shrike is the Antichrist?” Father Duré set his elbows on his raised knees and folded his hands. “If it’s not, we’re all in trouble.” He laughed bitterly. “It wasn’t long ago that I would have been delighted to discover an Antichrist … even the presence of some antidivine power would have served to shore up my failing belief in any form of divinity.” “And now?” Sol asked quietly. Duré spread his fingers. “I too have been crucified.”
The surge became a roaring, shouting, screaming mass of rioters; at that moment, the sum of the crowd’s IQ was far below that of its most modest single member. Mobs have passions, not brains.
Johnny squeezes her hand, and they are past, twisting left and downward along a busier branch, then switching directions again, and again, two all-too-conscious photons lost in a tangle of fiberoptic cables.
[A less-enlightened personage once asked Ummon What is the God-nature/Buddha/Central Truth> Ummon answered him A dried shit-stick]
“I don’t know,” says Hunt. “That doesn’t sound like something a poet whose reputation has lasted a thousand years would have written.” I shrug.
