The Race for God by Brian Herbert

would be a sea of sameness, and his thoughts would remain in line.
    So with his chicken on his shoulder that sunny afternoon, McMurtrey went to the podium on the makeshift stage and faced the multitude.
    They stood shoulder to shoulder and belly to backside as far as he could see—on the beaches, on the roads, on the rocky hillsides. Big black speakers had been placed everywhere so that all might hear.
    The ocean was a cool pale blue, lapping relentlessly in shimmering wave armies at the shoreline, wearing the land away little by little, imperceptibly. McMurtrey, as he stood there listening to the waves and watching them, thought he heard the subtle raspings of shoreline erosion, and in his mind’s eye he tried to envision the great storms of history at this place—as if all were occurring at once in a tremendous blast of water, wind and sound.
    Then the storms subsided and the people grew quiet, with the exception of a stooped woman in the front who waggled her fingers in the chicken beak ritual and sang out loudly:

    “O Chubby Mother,
    Let me rubba your belly . . .
    Let me rubba your belly”

    One of my followers , McMurtrey thought. God, she’s one of the stupid zealots!
    McMurtrey touched his lips, asking for quiet.
    He stood in afternoon sunlight telling the people he was a fraud. He told them everything, and it gushed forth in a torrent of phrases he hadn’t known he would use.
    The woman in the front moaned that she didn’t believe it, and other solitary cries rang from the throng. It saddened McMurtrey that his words were like knives in the hearts of some, but he knew this had to be done, that ultimately it would be for the best.
    When he had said everything, it seemed natural, comfortable, a confessional. He had purged his conscience, bared his tainted soul before all. He stood naked before them.
    He saw tears in the audience among those of all denominations, most evidently among the pious, whom he could see glowing softly yellow when he squinted. Nowhere, not even among those who bore swords and other weapons on their hips, did he detect even the flickering of a sneer or any sort of unkind expression. This despite the fact that he stood before them with a fat chicken on his shoulder.
    It should have been a mockery; they should have been hurling vegetables and fruit at him.
    As they waited for him to speak further, he looked beyond the people on the highest hillside, to the sky. A small cloud was chasing a puffy fat one, and they traveled on a high wind. He heard the wind beyond the sea noise, beyond the whisperings of the crowd.
    He looked back at them, and raised his voice to be heard above all the sounds crashing in his ears. His words boomed through the speakers:
    “I’ve told you of my life, that I’ve wasted years, that I’ve been a charlatan, a liar. Now, like the boy who cried wolf, I’m asking you to believe me when I tell you that God has spoken to me.”
    “Verily, it is so!” came a shout from the crowd. It was a man’s voice, deep and resonant.
    “We believe you!” a teenage girl exclaimed. “Praise the Lord! Our ships have come!” She had a shiny, bronze-colored stunbow strapped to her back.
    “Is anything too difficult for the Lord?’” a man called out, from just in front of the podium. He held an open Babul, and an electronic concordance pendant dangling from his neck flashed the scriptural reference in orange: NESI 18:14.
    A bearded man in a black caftan stepped forward, holding his Kooraq high. It was a brown leather tome, with elegant, flowing script inscribed on the cover. The man’s lips barely moved, and a voice seemed to come not from him, but rather, as in the case of a ventriloquist, from the volume itself: “WE BELIEVE IN ALLAH, AND IN THAT WHICH HAS BEEN SENT DOWN ON US. . . . TO HIM WE SURRENDER!”
    Then a Floriental man in a Wessornian business suit stepped forth with a long rolled scroll, identified himself as an Ota, and said, in a very high, clear voice: