Gordon R Dickson by The Final Encyclopedia (epub)

Author:The Final Encyclopedia (epub)
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

She stopped; and after the clear cadence of her voice, the silence seemed to ring in their ears. She spoke again, slowly.

“When did we come to fear death?” She turned her head, looking at all those about her. “For you, I see, fear death.”

The silence of the crowd continued. It was as if they had no power to make a sound, almost no power to breathe, until she should finish with them. Hal struggled against the reluctance of his body to return to life.

“Today—” her voice reached him again through the glass window in the ambulance—“you crowd the streets. Today the Militia does not come out to disperse you. Right now you are willing, in your hundreds, to take up weapons and march against the Belial-spawn and Antichrist.”

She paused, watching them all.

“But tomorrow—” her voice continued—“you will think better of it. You will not say you will not march; but you will find a thousand reasons to question the time and manner of marching, and so never leave Ahruma at all.

“When did you come to fear death? There is no death to fear. Our forefathers knew this, when they came from Earth. Why do you fail to know it now?”

The crowd neither moved nor made a sound.

“They knew, as we should know,” her voice went on, “that it does not matter if our bodies die, as long as the People of God continue. For then all are saved, and will live forever.”

Hal got his legs moving, and stirred them quietly on his stretcher, to get the blood moving in them. They made a small rustling sound between the stretcher surface and the covering blankets. But the two Militiamen in the bucket seats up front in the ambulance paid no attention. They were as caught up in Rukh’s speaking as the crowd outside.

“There is a man,” went on Rukh; and the repeaters in the crowd flung her words against the concrete fronts of the buildings facing the square on all four sides, “who has been in this city before today and will be here again, who is called by some the Great Teacher.”

She paused.

“He is a teacher of lies—Antichrist incarnate. But he envies us our immortality—yours and mine, sisters and brothers—for he is only mortal and knows he will die. He can be killed.

“For God alone is independently immortal. He would exist, even if Mankind did not; and because we are part of God, you and I, we are immortal also. But Antichrist, who comes among us now for our last great testing, has no hope of long life except in Mankind. Only if we accept him, and his like, can they hope to live.

“But because Mankind is of God, though the Enemy may slay our bodies he cannot touch our souls unless we give them freely to him. If we do, we are lost, indeed.

“But if we do not; then, though we may seem to suffer death, we will live eternally—not only in the Lord but in those who come after us, who will because of us continue to know our God.

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