CHAPTER 4
Of the struggle between religion and reason, I know this: Religion
is the more dangerous. When reason is
challenged, it will raise an objection.
It will raise questions. When
religion is challenged, it will raise an army.
It will raze cities.
- Grentus,
"The Problem with Paradise"
Etyiam walked briskly along the causeway, her pace an uneasy balance between her determination to reach her destination on schedule and her fear of actually arriving at it. The purple robes of her religious garb flowed behind her as she dodged the preponderance of saurians that were going in the opposite direction. A part of her desperately wanted to turn around and follow this majority. They were mostly workers from her own caste who were on their way home after a day's labor. They wore a diverse style of dress, some clad in durable but filthy work uniforms, no doubt returning from some construction site. Others were regally dressed in the smart, spotless white tunics that marked them as hand servants of the wealthy Priat elite.
The capital city of Uron was a vast
metropolis that spread for miles in every direction from Etyiam's current
location, as she was now entering the heart of the city, which contained the
colossal Temple of the World, as well as the imposing ministry buildings of the
government. It took a big government to
run an entire planet and it took a big capital city to hold it. Pulling her robes closed to drive off the
chill in the twilight air, Etyiam crossed a pedestrian bridge over the River
Keltay, which snaked though the city.
She headed up an anonymous avenue in the narrow gorge between two great buildings. It was getting well into the evening hours now and most people had already abandoned the government center until the next day. The darkened windows of the buildings stared emptily down upon her, like abandoned skulls awaiting the return of their flesh with the morning sun.
The slanted rays of the setting winter sun could no longer reach this side street and it seemed as if night had already arrived here. Darkness made the young Etyiam nervous and she hastened her pace to transverse the artificial canyon more quickly. This street was much emptier than the one before the bridge. It suddenly occurred to her she was the only gray skinned Ordinary on it, as the few people she passed had the green hides of Priat nobility. Some gave the lowborn female a disapproving glare, others a snobbish look away, while most just ignored her as if she was invisible. The steamy puffs of breath that escaped from their nostrils and mouths into the icy air gave them the aspect of mythical dragons, which made Etyiam's body shiver more than was required to stave off the chill. She felt sure her religious regalia was the only thing that kept many of them from spitting at her.
Their stares made Etyiam even more nervous about her imminent encounter. Why would a powerful senator like Ampharix summon a young Ordinary matron of no importance like Etyiam? She could do no more for this aged, renowned and feared politician than a fly could do for a Jacobeast. Etyiam knew the clergy was watching her because of her association with the heretic Sarwin, but she couldn't imagine this meeting was about that. If they wanted to reprimand her, someone would do it much farther down the chain of command than the likes of Ampharix!
She soon emerged from the dark, tight side street and into the vast openness of Monument Plaza. The setting sun bathed the great statues that lined the main esplanade in an orange light that seemed deceitfully warm in the nippy air.
Etyiam knew the story these statues told, as did all saurians, because they were taught from the day they first entered the schools. There were thirty-six statues lining the boulevard, eighteen on each side. Each statue stood several times the height of a saurian and each represented an important element in the World's history, as well as its destiny.
It began with T'Chen creating the World and the universe around it. Then She created saurian-kind in Her image and set them on the path to righteousness. The three major prophets of the ancient Scrolls were represented, as well as Yeetas, the despicable ruler of Scoggast. Etyiam paused briefly before the towering king of the Vartyiar. He held a saurian skull in his hairy hands. The skewed rays of sunset cast harsh shadows that made the face even more ghastly than the sculptor intended.
Only a quarter of his father's size, there was carved near the base of the Yeetas statue, a representation of the Q'Talon, the fetid son of the Vartyiar king. The Scrolls prophesized that one-day Yeetas would send his unholy progeny unto the World to corrupt the people away from T'Chen. No, Sarwin did not look anything like this Q'Talon, she thought to herself. Her friends had teased her relentlessly when she once admitted that she found her teacher attractive. It was unnerving how cruel they could be, both to her and to Sarwin. But she didn't care what they thought. She felt he was handsome beyond words.
Saurian history was riff with villains who had been tagged by the church as the Q'Talon, most notably the heretic Grentus, who long before Etyiam's time had proposed an outlandish theory that saurians were not created by T'Chen, as the Scrolls dictated. He said that they had instead slowly evolved from lesser species. From animals. Her trial was one of the most infamous in recent history and her execution one of the most brutal. But Grentus had ultimately failed to bring about the end of saurian-kind, as did all the other prospective Q'talons. No matter, the faithful still believed it would someday come and they must remain forever vigil.
Realizing she was running late, Etyiam dashed onward again. Now she passed those statues which represented the fall of the old World, when saurians had separated themselves into nations, warring among themselves for domination until at last they had all but obliterated themselves in an atomic conflagration that poisoned the World to this very day.
She next came upon a statue that depicted a saurian skeleton, which represented the cold nuclear winter, when Scoggast rose to the surface of the World and ruled over the planet through the long, bitter dark ages that followed. What was left of the saurian race starved, suffered and fell back to a pitiful existence based on stone and sticks. Etyiam felt ashamed every time she saw this statue.
But the next statue was her favorite. It was of Shradia, the matron messiah, to whom T'Chen had appeared and commanded to lead her people out of darkness and back into the light of civilization and piety. Shradia wrote the Contemporary Scrolls and forged the all-powerful church of T'Chen, which in time came to dominate the entire World. Her Scrolls said that someday she would send one of her own children back to the World, during a time of crisis for her church, when disbelievers were poised to unbalance it. The Scrolls said this child would bring proof of T'Chen to all the people of the World, forever removing all doubt as to her majesty.
It had not been easy for Shradia and her followers to bring the word of the Goddess to all the people of the World. There were still some independent states, remnants of the old world order that desired to retain their independence. The greatest of these was the proud nation-continent of Garath, where predominantly gray-skinned saurians had dwelled. While the rest of the World ate bugs and used charms to ward off evil spirits, they had maintained a comparatively civilized society. Unfortunately, the softness that civilization brings upon a people did not prepare them for the millions of righteous crusaders that poured over their borders. The invaders bore their Sacred Scrolls in one hand and crude swords in the other. The people of Garath had no choice but to accept one or the other into their bosom.
The Garath Crusade stretched into twenty-six years of brutal warfare before the T'Chen warriors could pacify the vast southern nation-continent. In the end, they claimed victory and welcomed the Garath people into the loving arms of the church. But the green-skins never forgave the grays for their insurgency and the decedents of Garath have long since been marginalized, subsisting in a caste from which their skin color gave them little chance of escaping.
Etyiam glanced at her own gray hands and sighed. Although she was from the Ordinary caste, she was raised in a religious institution for orphans when, as an infant, she was abandoned on the steps of a temple some nineteen years ago. She was fortunate enough that whoever discarded her had left her on the steps of an affluent temple in a Priat district. They had done so on the holiday of Portek, when saurians were required to be selflessly charitable. As a result, the gray-skinned Etyiam was raised in a privileged institution where normally only green hides would be allowed. Though she occasionally took some teasing from her verdant playmates, she was treated as an equal there. Well, most of the time anyway.
Etyiam finally crossed the great plaza of statuary and the great house of the senate rose imposingly before her. It was vanquished in size and splendor only by the titanic golden dome of the Temple of the World, which stood in the distance behind the senate building, framing it like a rising sun from Etyiam's current perspective.
The senate building was adorned with great purple banners proclaiming the infallible greatness of T'Chen. They flapped in the frigid air like the cloaks of titans from the Scrolls. Etyiam swallowed as she strode toward the eastern gate, where she had been instructed to report. She had seen this building many times, but this would be her first time within its exclusive walls. Etyiam felt both honored and terrified.
When she arrived at the gate, a stern matron-guards checked Etyiam's identity card against the roster of expected visitors she held. Finding the girl's name near the bottom of the list, she handed back the ID. The guard then swept over Etyiam's body with a handheld scanner and, finding nothing of concern, gestured inside with a callous grunt. Etyiam considered asking the guard for more precise directions to Ampharix's office, but decided against it. She passed through the door of inlaid gold, which was twice her height, and into the cavernous interior.
Fortunately, it took her only a few minutes of wandering through the vast, statue-lined corridors to find a directory. With its help, Etyiam found herself at Ampharix's door in a very short time. She swallowed hard and rang the bell. The white-clad, gray-skinned male who answered the door was clearly not the senator, but a hand-servant who happened to be near the door when the bell rang. He waved her inside to a large, ornate foyer of purple and gold. The servant said nothing to her, but went right back to work polishing the gilded trim of the walls. The place smelled clean. Like oiled wood.
Etyiam was about to ask him if he could inform someone of her arrival when suddenly a large set of double doors pulled open, revealing an older, Priat matron.
"I am..." began the startled girl.
"Etyiam. I know," said the stony matron, completing her sentence for her, "You are late."
"I'm so sorry, I..."
"Fortunately for you, the senator is also slightly behind schedule," interrupted the matron, "I am her secretary. Come with me."
The elder saurian turned and walked back through the double doors. Etyiam followed and found herself in a large, octagonal room, even more ornate than the first. Wordlessly, the male hand-servant shut the doors behind them.
"Sit," said the secretary, gesturing to an ornate couch upholstered in purple brocade, "I will return for you shortly."
The secretary opened an elaborately carved wooden door at the opposite side of the room and vanished within. Etyiam glanced at the couch, but was too nervous to sit and instead paced around the room, looking at the spiritual paintings that lined the walls.
Raised in a religious orphanage, Etyiam had little choice but to prepare for a career in the clergy. Her skin color would limit her advancement, but she would do better than most in her caste. Exposed to little else throughout most of her short life, Etyiam had become a strong believer in the T'Chen doctrine. She truly believed that T'Chen dwelt in heaven and would someday return to the World in glory. She would gather up all worthy saurians to join Her there, just as Shradia had prophesized twelve centuries earlier.
All worthy saurians... The words echoed in the young girl's mind. Some had come to doubt Etyiam's worthiness of late and she, herself, began to doubt it also. Although she believed sincerely in the word of T'Chen and had never strayed from the moral path laid out by the temple, she had recently begun to associate with one of the ministry's greatest foes. She didn't mean to. She was only taking some science classes at the Kreslar University to round out her otherwise strict religious education.
One day, while crossing the campus between classes, she came upon a rally outside the student center. She could see it was the heretic Sarwin giving a speech on the theory of evolution, which he unapologetically supported. She recognized him from pictures she'd seen in the media. She had always thought him to be handsome and eloquent, though she thought his notions of heaven and history to be peculiar. Etyiam knew her masters would strongly disapprove of her even pausing to listen to the excommunicated Ordinary, but she found herself irresistibly drawn to him and over the course of his lecture, slowly made her way to the front of the crowd.
Although his words disavowed everything the priests had ever taught her about her history and the ways of things, try as she might, she could not find fault with his arguments. Etyiam naturally had a curious and logical intellect and Sarwin's opinions touched those rational areas of her mind in a way the dogmatic teachings of the temple never had. Sarwin pointed out all sorts of evidence to support his radical theories, while the rationale behind everything the priests had ever taught her boiled down to "because it is thus written in the Scrolls."
Normally, his arguments alone might not have been enough to crack the thick shell of dutiful belief that years of religious seminary had built around Etyiam, but the gray-skinned radical touched yet another part of her brain that was repressed by the church. Etyiam was at an age where the chemicals in her body were compelling her to take notice of the males she encountered. The church, of course, disapproved of anything but the most passionless and formal of encounters between the genders before marriage, but as an impending member of the clergy class, marriage was not in Etyiam's future.
Thereafter and against her better judgment, Etyiam sought out Sarwin's rallies and attended them, without telling her clerical masters. Over time, she came to believe in him more, if not in his actual theories of the universe. What won her over was that he was willing to admit he didn't have all the answers, but was trying to find them. This was in stark contrast to the church's doctrine that it not only did it knew all the answers, it in itself was the answer and that no one need look anywhere else. This arrogant attitude had always rubbed Etyiam the wrong way and perhaps in some private revolt against it, she would give this handsome heretic a chance to prove his case.
In time, she passed from a passive listener to an active participant in discussions about his theories and a few times was able to speak to him in private. At first, she downplayed her theological background for fear it might frighten him away from her, as he was the constant recipient of threats from religious zealots. On the contrary, it seemed to please him that he was able to reach someone of her upbringing. He felt if he could enlighten someone so entrenched in spiritual thought, then perhaps he could influence many others less saturated with mystical beliefs.
About two weeks ago, Etyiam saw that Sarwin was looking for a new student assistant. On a whim, she applied for the position, not giving much thought to the severe consequences that would surely befall her when her devout masters would inevitably learn of it.
Then just yesterday she received a letter from the senate general's office, commanding that she appear at Ampharix's office the following evening. It gave no explanation as to why. She could not fathom that someone like Ampharix was to berate someone as lowly as Etyiam for her association with Sarwin and other than that she had done nothing that would aggravate the church. Her short career had heretofore been otherwise exemplary.
At that moment, the wooden door at the far end of the room opened to again reveal the stone-faced secretary.
"The senator will receive you now," she announced, some vague hint of scorn in her voice.
Etyiam gulped hard. She would have her answers soon.