Sunday dawns bright and hot. I reluctantly put on the dress Jen and Angel made me buy and go to meet Sam downstairs. I have no pockets, don't know if I'm allowed to carry a bag, and I feel very unsafe without even a utility knife. Sam's wearing a black suit, white shirt, black tie.Very monochrome. He looks solid, but going by his face he feels as unsure of himself as I am. "Ready?" I ask.
He nods. "I'll call the taxi."
The Parish Church is a big stone building some distance away from where we live. There's a tower at one end, as sharp and axisymmetrical as a relativistic impactor (if warships were made of stone and had holes drilled in their dorsal end with huge parabolic chimes hanging inside). The bells are ringing loudly, and the car park is filling with taxis and males and females dressed in period costume as we arrive. I see a few faces I know, Jen's among them. But I find I don't recognize most of the people in the crowd as we wait outside, and I hang on to Sam's arm for fear of losing him.
Internally, the Church contains of a single room, with a platform at one end and rows of benches carved from dead trees facing it. There's an altar on the platform, with a long naked blade lying atop it beside a large gold chalice. We file in and sit down. As soft music plays, a procession walks up the aisle from the rear of the building. There are three males, physically aged but not yet senescent, wearing distinctive robes covered in metallic thread. They climb the platform and take up set positions. Then the one at the front and right begins to speak, and I realize with a start that he's Major-Doctor Fiore.
"Dear congregants, we are gathered here today to remember those who have gone before us. Frozen faces carved in stone, the frozen faces of multitudes." He pauses, and everyone around us repeats his words back to him, a low rumbling echo that seems to go on and on forever.
Fiore continues to recite gibberish in portentous tones at an increasing pace. Every sentence or two he stops, and the congregation repeats his words back to him. I hope it's gibberish—some of it is not only baffling but vaguely menacing, references to being judged after our deaths, punishment for sins, rewards for obedience. I glance sideways but quickly realize everybody else is watching him. I mouth the words but feel deeply uneasy about it. Some folks seem to be getting worked up, shouting the responses.
Next, a zombie in an alcove strikes up a turgid melody on some sort of primitive music machine, and Fiore tells us to turn the paper books in front of us to a set page. People begin singing the words there, and clapping in time, and they don't make any sense either. The name "Christian" features in it repeatedly, but not in any context I understand. And the message of the sing-along is distinctly sinister, all about submission and conformity and reward feedback loops. It's as if I've got some sort of deep-rooted reflex that refuses to let me absorb propaganda uncritically: I end up reading the book with a frown on my face.
After half an hour or so, Fiore signals the zombie to stop playing. "Dearly beloved," he says, his tone unctuous and confiding. He leans forward on the lectern, searching our faces. "Dearly beloved." I add my own sarcastic mental commentary to the proceedings—Too dear for you to afford , I footnote him. "Today I would like you all to extend a warm welcome to our newest members, cohort six. We are a loving Church, and it behooves us"—He actually used the word "behooves," he actually said that! —"to gather them to our breast and welcome them fully into our family." He smiles ecstatically and clutches the lectern as if a zombie catamite hidden behind it is sucking his cock. "Please welcome our newest members, Chris, El, Sam, Fer, and Mick, and their wives Jen, Angel, Reeve, Alice, and Cass."
Everyone around me—except Sam, who looks as confused as I feel—suddenly starts smacking their hands together in front of them. It's some kind of welcoming ritual, I guess, and the noise is surprisingly loud. Sam catches my eye and begins to clap, tentatively, but then Fiore holds up a hand and everybody stops.
"My children," he says, gazing down at us fondly, "our new brethren have only been here for three days. In that time, they have had much to learn and see and do, and some of them have made mistakes. To err is human, and to forgive is also human. It is ours to forgive and to pardon. To pardon, for example, Mrs. Alice Sheldon of number six, for her difficulty with plumbing. Or to Mrs. Reeve Brown of number six, for her unfortunate public display of nudity the other day. Or to—"
He's drowned out by laughter. I look round and see that suddenly people are laughing at me and pointing. I feel a rush of embarrassment and anger. How dare he do this? But it's intimidating, too. There must be fifty people here, and some of them are staring as if they're trying to figure out what I look like without any clothes on. If I was me, if I was in my own self-selected body, I'd call him out on the spot—but I'm not. In the sick pit of my stomach I realize that they're never going to forget that I've been singled out, and that this makes me a target. After all, that's how peer pressure works, isn't it? That's what this is about. The experimenters can't expect to generate a workable dark ages society in just three years by dumping a bunch of convalescents in orthohuman bodies into the polity and letting them wander around. They need a social mechanism to make us require conformity of one other, and the best way to do that is to provide a mechanism to make us punish our own deviants—
"—Or to forgive Cass, for her tendency to oversleep. Such as today, when she seems to have forgotten to come to Church."
They're not looking at me anymore, but they're muttering, and there's a dark undercurrent of disapproval at work. I catch Sam's eye, and he looks frightened. He reaches out sideways, and I grab his hand and cling to it as if I'm drowning.
"I urge you all to give your sympathies to Mick, her husband, who has to support such a slothful wife, and to help her out when next you see her." And now I can follow everybody's gaze to Mick. He's short and wiry and has a big, sharp nose and dark, brooding eyes. He looks angry and defensive, for good reason. The bruising weight of a five-point infraction has left me feeling weak in the knees and frightened, and now he's getting it as a proxy for his wife's failure to get up in the morning—
Failure to get up in the morning? I feel like yelling at Fiore: It's an excuse, idiot, an excuse for not being seen in public!
Fiore moves on to discuss other people, other cohorts, stuff that's meaningless to me right now. My netlink comes up, insisting I vote on whether to add or subtract points to each of the other cohorts, with a list of sins and achievements tallied against each name. I don't vote for any of them. In the end our own cohort gets dumped on unanimously by the voters of the five older ones. We all lose a couple of points, signaled by the tolling of a sullen iron bell hanging in an archway near the back of the Church. Fiore signals the zombie to strike up the organ and leads us in another meaningless song, then it's the end of the service. But I can't run away and hide just yet because the auto-da-fé is followed by a social reception in honor of the new cohort, so we can smile brittle smiles and eat canapés under the magnolia trees while they politely sneer at us.
There are tables laid out in the ornamental garden called a graveyard that backs onto the Church. They're covered with white cloths and stacked with glasses of wine. We're led outside and left to fend for ourselves. Taxis don't run on Sunday during Church services. I find myself standing stiffly with my back as close to the churchyard wall as I can get, clutching a wineglass with one hand and Sam with the other. My shoes are pinching, and my face feels set in a permanent grimace.