Trance Priests in Space
News of a weird priesthood alarms Ash Fork citizenry
Reverend Ralston couldn’t define what was wrong with spooking on the Poppy Trail, except that “it removes from the individual,” he said, “what is most valuable to the community, which is the fear of being excluded.” He said the spooks were forming a separate religion around the experience of being sucked into the dark drive of a LuciReactor. “This is a cult.” He delivered the news like it was a cancer diagnosis.
He was in Rosie’s Cafe, at a booth with the publisher of the Ash Fork Herald, Morris Grundig, the real estate agent, Howard Sails; and Luther Wilson, whose son was being mentored by Bergamo. This mentoring had included hitching a ride with a dark drive to probability fields which by their nature and intent remain just prior to manifestation. They are something like holograms, but without the sense of fakery, of something that does not belong to its location.
“Well of course it’s a cult,” Rosie said, as she poured coffee into their almost full cups. “Let me top that for you Reverend.” She laughed coarsely.
“The tragic part of it is that they’re missing their lives,” Morris said. His words were let out like fishing line. He looked around to make sure everybody was in agreement with his tepid sentiment. “Those reactors suck the light out of them.” His head bobbed up and down.
Reverend Raulston, also, continually nodded his head in agreement with what was being said around him. He was an agreeable man on the surface, but he wasn’t kind. “Watching those spook shows is like watching pieces of their brains blow away in the wind,” he said. “I’m all for individual freedom, but I don’t think that means freedom to set a bad example for the younger children.” He looked significantly at Luther, who blushed.
Spook shows were the ghostly images of the spooks which remained on or near the Poppy Tail after they had been sucked into the dark drive of a Luci. They’d lay in the poppies and when a Luci moved onto the trail they’d look up at it just before it vanished into the probability fields, and they vanished with it. They were still there but temporarily non solid, visible only in these ghostly traces.
“Why can’t we hear anything from that damned Mission if they’re practicing music?” Luther’s eyes were large and unblinking in his long, sad face. “I asked Lewis and you know what he said? He said they shift the frequency off phase. What the hell does that mean?”
The other men shifted uncomfortably. “I don’t know as I’d want a boy of mine in that Mission all the time,” Howard said. He never looked at Luther while he was saying it. He looked down into his coffee while he stirred it cool.
“Some things are hard to talk about,” the Reverend said. “All of us want our children to be happy, and to be happy, they have to fit in with the others.” “You know what he told me?” Wilson asked. “What who told you?” Howard finally looked at him. “What Lewis told me about the Count.” “We can’t know until you tell us,” Reverend Raulston said. “I know this must be mighty hard for you, him being your only boy and all.”
“He told me a story about a trance priest.”
“What does that have to do with Bergamo?” “Well, he spends all his time over there at that Mission so I guess he heard it there, from Bergamo. Don’t you?” What was the story?” Morris prodded. “He told me a story about an order of priests, called trance priests, and nobody knows much about them because they stay separate from the others. They don’t have any references to the others, like school or sports or band practice or military service. Because nobody knows anything about them, and can’t really know anything about them, they go into a trance in the company of the priest.”
“Sounds like a cult to me,” Morris said. “Sounds like something a spook would think about.”
“Is he saying Bergamo is one of these priests?” the Reverend asked.
“I don’t know exactly what he’s saying,” Luther turned his hands palms up as if making an offering. “I don’t understand half of what he says since he’s been learning the keyboards. He says the trance priest picks out somebody to succeed him because they have special talents.”
The slightest smile caught the corner of Howard’s mouth. Luther saw it. He pushed away his coffee cup, stood and walked out without another word. “It’s got to be hard for him,” the Reverend said. The corner of Howard’s mouth twitched again. Morris saw it and giggled. His eyes darted from Howard to the Reverend, they all chuckled in the same peculiar way, like they were running the same program.
At the Mission the Count was not just aware of everything going on with the good people of Ash Fork, he was orchestrating it with the keyboards. “How can they just make things up about you?” Lewis asked. “They aren’t making it up. They’re projecting it. A man once told Carl Jung that he’d been making up his dreams to trick him. Jung said, ‘Yes. You made them up. Do you understand that?” “The dream and the invention are running the same software?” “That’s right.”