Mansard

"No economy can support an institutionalized religion of this size. It's a matter of simple arithmetic."

Mansard was drunk and he didn't give a damn. Over the last few months, his downtime drinking had been getting worse and worse, but when anyone summoned the courage to say something to him, he simply shrugged and asked them what they expected. In a world that had patently gone crazy, the sane man surely had a moral obligation to shut out as much of the lunacy as possible. He looked slowly around the bar. O'Ryan's was a cheesy joint, but that went for every bar in the city, and probably for every bar in the whole sorry country. He ought to be thankful that there was any kind of bar at all for him in which to lose himself. The return of prohibition had been a major plank in the Faithful/Wrench platform. When they had ridden the landslide into power, however, the idea had been quietly dropped. Someone had whispered in Faithful's ear that, judging from the last time around, the net result of a new Volstead act would be to give an astronomical amount of money to organized crime. Larry Faithful might claim a direct line to God, but in day-to-day practice he was nothing if not the pragmatist. The last thing that he and any of the people around him wanted was to give astronomical amounts of money to anyone outside their circle.

Still, Faithful and his gang had done what they could to discourage the social drinker. The friendly tavern had been reduced to a place of shame. Gone was the warmth and comfort that Mansard remembered from his youth. All that remained was a flyblown red-and-blue Budweiser sign with a third of its tubes burned out, a rack of bad generic booze on electronic measure, and a line of barstools so patched with gaffer tape that scarcely any of their original fabric remained. The walls were dominated by the legally mandated display signs that reminded patrons of the manifold evils of demon drink. The sound system oozed one after another of the mawkish saccharine neobilly ballads that dominated the top forty. The deacons and even the miserable, vindictive children of the Young Crusaders came through at least twice a night, checking IDs and generally intimidating the customers.

Mansard signaled for another shot.

"It's like the poor goddamned Tibetans," he said to no one in particular. "The whole sad-ass country, which was an uphill struggle at the best of times, fell apart in the mid-twentieth century under the strain of supporting a system in which 60 percent of able-bodied men were engaged in full-time religion. The country starved because its main industry was Buddhism. This country is going the self-same route because our major industry has become Jes-us."

The sneering singsong stress on the final word was a clear parody of the Faithful whine. Most of the other people in the bar were avoiding looking at him, trying to pretend that he did not exist. Eddy the bartender was beginning to give him the hard eyeball. Eddy generally tolerated his mouthing off. Mansard did, after all, piss away the bulk of his salary in O'Ryan's and places like it. Only when people got nervous enough to start leaving would Eddy move firmly to shut him down.

That moment was getting very close. A shabby middle-aged couple with furtive faces who, from the look of them, subsisted on the dingy fringe of the black market, were already gathering up their change.

Mansard snarled at them. "What's the matter with you? Am I driving you out?"

The man took the woman's arm protectively as they stood up. They refused even to glance in Mansard's direction. Mansard swayed ominously, half off his stool.

"I'm talking to you."

The man raised a frightened, defensive hand. "Listen, mister, we don't want no trouble. We've got troubles of our own."

" 'Fraid of the thought police? Is that it?"

The couple were edging toward the door. Mansard finished his shot. He doubted that Eddy would give him another.

"You don't have to worry about me. They can't touch me. Charlie Mansard can blaspheme all he wants and there ain't a damn thing the deacons can do about it. You want to know why?"

He received no response, but he went on anyway.

"They can't touch me because they need me too bad. I'm an artist, goddamn it, and they can't do without my art. I make their stinking miracles for them."

Eddy was moving down the bar. The boom was about to be lowered on Charlie Mansard's evening.

Carlisle

The call had come just twenty minutes earlier: There was a bomb in the prayer parlor at the corner of Broadway and Eighth. The caller had identified herself as a Lefthand Path. She had used the antihoax code that was the terrorsect's only compromise with the authorities, so it was close to certain that the call was the real thing. The LPs inevitably meant business and rarely screwed around with false alarms. The data had flashed on the 17 screens as an emergency interrupt; it would have simultaneously been routed to the deacons and the bomb squad. 17, the NYPD's lower Manhattan anti-terror task force, worked out of the brand-new Combined Crime Control complex on Astor Place, and there was no excuse for them not being among the first on the scene.

By the time Lt. Harry Carlisle had reached the corner, uniforms had already closed off the streets for three blocks in every direction. Union Square was probably already gridlocked, the traffic beginning to back up all the way to midtown. Carlisle took a deep breath of the crisp autumn air. It was a tense situation, but at least it was real. He was out of the Astor Place complex and temporarily beyond the reach of its internal politics, its paranoia, and its induced religious mania. He had joined the police department to chase criminals, not to absorb a lot of crap about the wrath of God and the punishment to come. Of course, back in the days when he had been a rookie patrolman, life in general had seemed a whole lot simpler. Religion had been a thing that was there on a Sunday morning for those who wanted it. It had not been a vims that infected the whole damned country.

A heavily armored blue-and-white bomb-squad truck with black-and-yellow warning bars on its rear doors was pulling up beside the prayer parlor in a flurry of lights and sirens. Reeves and Donahue, also from T7, were already there. They were standing well back, keeping a healthy distance between themselves and any possible explosion. It was the members of the bomb squad who were paid to risk their lives. T7 sifted for clues once the danger was over.

The bomb squad, in full blast armor, was off-loading its ATCO J40 search robot. The prayer parlor was one of the Good Shepherd chain, the biggest franchise east of the Mississippi. In Harry Carlisle's estimation, the prayer parlor was one of the rinkiest of dinky ideas in an ultimately rinky dink epoch. If a person wanted to talk to God, all he had to do was to plastic in, duck into a pod, and wait while his credit was checked out. If his plastic was good, the opaque cover closed and he was free, in seeming privacy, to mutter his specific needs, hidden fears, or darkest confessions into the nativity-blue microphone that was supposed to lead directly to the ear of the Almighty. The sense of privacy was illusory. The microphone also led to the deacons' central records complex in Virginia Beach. Each individual's desires, fantasies, and shameful little sins were collated, analyzed, and data-shaped. If no other action was taken, they would finally be downloaded into the memory banks by which the Good Lord, with the help of his ever-present secret police force, kept his flock on the straight and narrow. According to the deacons, God could never get enough data.