The Snake Oil Wars Read online

  “By all means,” Aurelius prompted. “I am as interested as counsel.”

  “Magnificent” was Coyul’s tactful addition; the terms used by Sorlij were more pungent. He chose his words carefully now. “If I’m guilty of anything, it is arrogance – a failing ascribed to Lucifer, true, but also to the young of both our races. Barion wanted to do something never done before. I wanted to go him one better. Sibling rivalry.”

  Only about two percent of anthropoids in the known universe made it as far as Cultural Threshold, Coyul explained, though the species was fairly widespread.

  “Objection!” Helm trumpeted. “There is absolutely no way to prove the existence of such worlds populated by men. Not to mention the implied heresy.”

  Aurelius considered the objection, “Can the witness substantiate?”

  “By logic, yes.”

  “Logic is not hard evidence,” Helm objected again. “This is intellectual obfuscation.”

  Aurelius ruled to let Coyul continue, reserving the right at any time to allow or strike. “Can you by a simple method demonstrate these statements?”

  Coyul looked as pained as a mathematician forced to recite his multiplication tables as evidence of qualification. “Will you concede that certain types of soil and climate are beneficial to certain plants?”

  So with carbon-based life. Where Earthlike conditions were present, Earth similar life tended to develop, higher forms emerging when and if conditions continued in their favor. Along the way natural selection went through innumerable random experiments. Man existed on Earth today because, millions of years ago, while the great dinosaurs were stumbling through daylight toward extinction, a tiny warm-blooded creature was clinging to tree limbs in the dark, with prehensile claws to steady itself and stereoscopic vision to judge distance more efficiently than a reptile could.

  The root of the problem was that this creature was nocturnal. The dark was part of its deepest memory.

  “You have never forgotten the dark,” Coyul addressed the Megachurch at large. “Even when it ceased to be safety and became a time of fear. Became the evil inextricable from good. You all have it, like the primordial dream of falling that jerks you awake. Even by Your Honor’s time, this dualism was an accepted part of religious thinking. The Manicheans, for example, through whom the concept found its way into Christian culture.”

  More and more dangerous stirrings ran through the crowd. Someone catcalled. From another side came: “False prophets will rise!” Shrill insults fell like rain about the mild little figure on the stand.

  “I’m sorry,” Coyul said, raising his voice a little to be heard, “genuinely sorry to have to tell you this in this manner. We handled it badly, let things just go on —”

  “Devil!” a woman shrieked. “Go back where you came from.”

  “Madam, nothing would please me more,” Coyul confessed. “But I have to finish well what we commenced in ignorance. One doesn’t begin a career in obstetrics by assuming discovery beneath a rose bush or delivery by stork. And the cosmos doesn’t center on your destiny anymore than your world is centrally concerned with the metamorphosis of caterpillar to butterfly.”

  “I see.” Aurelius meditated for a moment. “I’ll allow the testimony. Mr. Helm is overruled. Are you with us, Counsellor?”

  Helm’s distraction was the Senator from Wisconsin, who had bustled down an aisle to bend over the little lawyer in whispered conference, sliding an envelope before him.

  Speed returned to his witness. “I have only one more question, Coyul. How old are you?”

  Coyul had to stop and think. “To tell the truth, I’ve lost count.”

  “Roughly?”

  “Several hundred million years, I suppose.”

  “Give or take?” Speed’s homely features broke in a crooked grin. “Cross examine, Mr. Helm?”

  The Senator’s voice was a triumphant hiss in Helm’s ear. He vented his manic trademark giggle. “Got it Below Stairs. A few favors called in, a little spade work, and thank God for Roy Cohn.”

  The envelope contained a single sheet of paper with three names printed in large capitals. All three were recognizable anywhere in the world or post life, except perhaps central New Guinea or the remoter stretches of Siberia. One was heavily circled in pencil.

  “Your best bet.” The Senator tapped the circled choice. “How’s that for a hole card? His wife has been looking for him everywhere.”

  “Does Defense plan to cross-examine?” Aurelius queried.

  “Yes, Your Honor.” Helm pocketed the envelope with an approving nod to his associate. “Good work. We should have known.”

  “We know now.” The Senator had never been a handsome man; now he looked positively malevolent. “I don’t know why he’s hiding out, but you can stop him cold.”

  As Helm approached the witness stand, Coyul reaffirmed his first impression of the man: the nineteenth-century notion of a poet in appearance; beneath, a graceful dancing snake.

  “You said you have no name other than Coyul among your own alleged kind.”

  “I was given no other name,” Coyul testified.

  “Although others have been ascribed to you, such as Prince of Darkness?”

  “Yes.”

  “And after that demonstration that blinded the eye but not the mind, I recall that you have also been known as Lord of Light.”

  “That too,” Coyul admitted. “Lucifer, Tempter, Adversary – all equally unflattering and inaccurate.”

  “Inaccurate? A moment ago you stated that the cosmos did not center on Man’s destiny any more than this world was centrally concerned with caterpillars.”

  Helm delivered his zinger to the jury and audience. “To a Christian viewpoint, that is an inducement to despair, which would neatly fall into the Tempter’s suzerain, so far as he was able. Would you deny that?”

  So far as he was able: there it was again. Veiled as Speed, Helm still leaked readable meaning to Coyul. Again he detected conflict in the man, as if something in his own logic would not quite mesh gears. God’s will supreme, the Devil powerless without it. Yet for all the conflict, a formidable and obsessive strength of purpose.

  “Does the Devil deny that?”

  “Objection.”

  “Sustained. Mr. Helm,” Aurelius cautioned drily, “play not so obviously on the plebes. This is all very strong wine for them.”

  “Very well.” Helm took the rebuff with gritted teeth. “Does the witness deny that?”

  From stubborn Speed: “Question leads the witness.”

  Not at all leading, but Speed, bless him, wasn’t giving a free inch anywhere. While the bench considered its ruling, Coyul’s mind went on-line to Felim at Records Retrieval —

  COYUL TO FELIM: QUERY PROGRESS PETER HELM IDENT?

  FELIM TO COYUL: NEGATIVE LAST THREE CENTURIES. STILL CHECKING BUT THE INFIDEL DOES NOT EXIST.

  COYUL TO FELIM: HELL HE DOESN’T. KEEP GOING BACK. ECSTATIC SECTS, ALL VARIANTS, EVEN MANICHEANS. I NEED TO KNOW WHERE THIS VERY DANGEROUS LITTLE MAN IS COMING FROM. DIG, YOU PERFERVID RUG DEALER.

  FELIM TO COYUL: ACKNOWLEDGE. MAY THE FLEAS OF A THOUSAND CAMELS BITE AND AFFLICT YOU.

  COYUL TO FELIM: HAVING WONDERFUL TIME. WISH YOU WERE HERE INSTEAD OF ME.

  “Your Honor,” Speed asserted, “Defense is laboring to put a certain color and wholly unwarranted construction on my client’s testimony.”

  “And you have not been as diabolical?” Helm flared at him. “You have put a civil case that requires such questioning, introduced a cerebral and secular line of examination which I am constrained to follow in cross. My compliments, Mr. Speed. However, in this welter of cerebrality, let us not forget my client or his motives, which mirror those of every Christian in this church.”

  Helm paused for the scattered cheers. Home viewers saw the cameras cut quickly to Lance Candor, unfortunately discovered picking his nose. “Mr. Candor is a Christian Reconstructionist. The question reelects on his deepest beliefs and the actions der
ived from them.”

  “I find the witness’s responses troubling myself,” Aurelius confessed. “He will answer the question.”

  “Yes,” Coyul responded. “In some it might induce despair. In others perhaps art.”

  “And therefore be consonant with the Devil’s intentions?”

  “That construction might be —”

  “Answer the question as put to you. Is it not so consonant?”

  “I suppose it is if —”

  “Thank you, You have described your brother Barion as a scientist who brought certain apes to – I believe you called it – Cultural Threshold. Would you enlarge on that term?”

  Cultural Threshold, Coyul defined, was the point at which an intelligent species began to adapt environment to itself rather than the other way around. Stone tools, for example, which in turn further developed the brain toward even more complex invention and culture. A benevolent domino effect.

  “I see, And you allege that you and Barion created humans out of these apes?”

  “No.” Coyul passed a hand over his eyes, weary of spelling out the intricate shorthand formulae of his own culture. “We took a pre-human creature and simply accelerated a process already in motion. With good or ill result, depending on your view.”

  “At which time you were already in disagreement with your Lord – excuse me, your brother?”

  “I was as responsible for the experiment as Barion, even more so. I corrected for his error in the elect of oxygen on the cortex. In any case, without boosted intelligence, the subject would never have survived the predictable rigors of the environment.”

  “Never have survived?” Helm’s eyes lit with opportunity. “I’m sure this honorable jury notes the heresy wrapped in scholars’ terms. From God’s ultimate creation to an ape unable to survive without the aid of alchemy. I put it to the witness and this jury that this alleged noble experiment is no more than a clever misrepresentation of the rebellion of Satan against God; that in any Christian country the author of such heresy would be jailed or even hanged.” He impaled the foreman with his eyes. “Even yours, in your time, Master Wycherley.”

  To Helm’s surprise, the jury foreman answered firmly in his Yorkshire burr: “Not without fair trial, he would not. You could not say that of Spain.”

  No profit there; Helm left it quickly and brought the focus back to Coyul. “Do you deny that you speak heresy?”

  “Mr. Helm, you are tedious.”

  “Witness will answer the question,” the bench directed.

  “How? It’s apples and oranges, a divine scenario against physics and chemistry. Nature plays no favorites.”

  “More heresy,” said Helm.

  “I was there,” Coyul tried patiently. “Intelligence is selective but nature is random. Like a shotgun from which, out of a hundred pellets aimed at distant possibility, one might hit. Most will miss. In the case of anthropoids, ninety-eight percent.”

  “May we inquire of your expert knowledge how we fare against other such experiments?”

  Watching at home, Purji knew the look on Coyul’s face. When truth is useless, be kind.

  “Because you were CT’d much earlier than usual,” Coyul began cautiously, “you are the toughest and most adaptable of your species in the universe. And among the most technologically advanced.” Also the most violent, but that wouldn’t help his case just now.

  Helm bowed slightly. “You honor us. Though the jury and this Christian assembly would hardly consider that paramount.”

  “Not bad for openers, Mr. Helm. Or for survival.”

  “Then surely, from your vast cosmic experience you must have gleaned some spiritual comparison as well. Or would you consider that insignificant?”

  “The spiritual. That is a problem.”

  “I daresay, for you.”

  “You’re not the worst.”

  “We are relieved,” said Helm over a groundswell of catcalls.

  “Your Honor?” Speed requested and got a moment of private conference with Coyul, towering over the Prince in the witness box. “He’s already brought in the tinge of heresy. No matter how you answer, he’ll twist fact to these dimensions.”

  “He said it, Josh. I didn’t.”

  “Flies and mules, boy. Flies you catch with sugar, not vinegar.”

  “There’s too much sugar in their spiritual diet already. Diabetics. You know what I’ve got to do.”

  “I know something about mules,” Speed maintained. “Helm is one. Behind all that articulate logic is a belief in the totally illogical.”

  The man was right – and so damned familiar. That highpitched, twanging voice was on the very tip of memory. “All right, Josh. I’ll be as sweet as I can.”

  Speed sat down; the clerk repeated the question.

  “You are the most spiritually passionate humans I’ve ever encountered.”

  “Praise!” Helm turned oat to the crowd at large. “From one present at the Creation, who graciously admits our natural aspiration to the Elect of God!”

  A tidal wave of applause greeted his triumph, whistling and cheering, drowning out Speed’s futile objections and Aurelius pounding for order.

  “Order! Order! Peace!” But the faithful would not be quelled, Only when Helm raised a restraining hand did they begin to subside. The subtle shift of power felt ominous to Coyul.

  “Be silent or I will clear this court. Counsel for Defense will hereafter address himself to this court, not the plebes, or I will find him in contempt.”

  That contempt and the power he felt conferred on him by the audience was audible in Helm’s retort. “My apologies. Your Honor.” He moved to face Coyul again. “I am nearly finished with this witness. I put it to him that this alleged experiment is a tissue of lies; that Man was created by God in His image and that you as His rebellious servant could not, for all your perversity, make one move without His willing it. But you tried, didn’t you? Your gracefully admitted responsibility in that Creation was to make Man fall. Isn’t that right? Isn’t it?”

  And Purji, watching Helm on the home screen, thought: No wonder hove the Charleston. With so long to live, it’s love and dance or go mad.

  “You seem hesitant, Prince; one might say loath to answer.”

  Coyul answered with more sadness than subterfuge. “Simply to deny says nothing, I’m not your Devil, Mr. Helm. You insist I am because you must. All of you.”

  “By all means; in simplest terms,” Helm smiled tolerantly for the jury’s benefit. “For our limited understanding.”

  “In American terms,” Coyul said. “Some years back there was an American fad for something called past life therapy...”

  A number of “therapists” made a good living from sounding the subconscious thoughts of romantically inclined mediocrities for the longs, queens, swashbucklers and conquerors supposedly lurking within. One impartial psychologist observed at the time that the human psyche was always full of old B movies, though it was a fun way to redecorate an otherwise unremarkable life and harmless as playing Monopoly.

  “An age-old longing among your kind, Mr. Helm. Carl Jung called it the collective unconscious.”

  By which were meant the myths that explained not the human mind but the deepest heart and that enduring darkness present from the beginning. Oedipus, Osiris, the dying and reviving gods, the Grail, Judas and Modred, Loki, Grendel, the dark urge to entropy, the fall of Man, of Valhalla, of Satan himself. Great quests, great stirrings, great betrayal and loss – all painted in vivid primary colors. The conflicts and undying ideals of the human spirit.

  “This states the condition at its best, Mr. Helm. The human soul is a passionate pulp writer, dramatizing Fall and Redemption in a script that makes you the star, when the moment of Creation and Fall were simultaneous, no more – and magnificently no less than the terrible beauty of knowing you existed for a little and would end, and your myths the hack-written product of a mind that will ever put what it feels above what it thinks or sees. Are these und
erstandable terms?”

  “Indeed,” Helm acknowledged, more subdued. “They are eloquence of a kind.”

  “I was there.”

  “And yet we are here, Prince.” Helm uncoiled and struck. “By whatever name; Heaven, Topside, Hell or Below Stairs, we did not end. We continue. Only the Devil could so malign the majesty of Creation, and only the Devil would. We are here. Perverse as you are, can you not see the hand of God in that?”

  “You are perverse!” Coyul snapped back at last. “You and your kind of human that take your transient lives and make them sterile with groveling and guilt. Take the warm little light of a shining intelligence in a dark place and let it die from guilt and fear.”

  “I repeat —” And yet Helm was surprised by the sudden power out of that soft, near-epicene figure on the stand. “In our own immortality, do you not see God?”

  Coyul hesitated, weary of Helm, ages of him. “I have been tempted to look for the entity you call God in many places. Hoped for Him, dusted for His prints, but never found them except perhaps in men and women who rose above themselves to say we instead of I before they died of neglect or were crucified. Immortality is a loose term, sir, inadmissible evidence. There have been other post lives from other worlds. They passed away as their last energy dissipated. This world, this galaxy, this single breath of the universe will exhale into the next. Even me, Mr. Helm, and the cosmos will neither mourn nor even remember me. I am not depressed by the prospect.”

  “By Heaven’s very gates,” Helm swore to the jury. “Can we not hear in this passive lie the vindictive agony of the Pit?”

  “You wanted simple terms,” said Coyul, “American terms. There’s a saying in Poker. ‘If there’s only one game in town, you might as well play.’”

  11

  Ladies of the hour —

  “It’s the ‘Ricky Remsleep Show’! Starring that underground favorite, RICKY REMSLEEP! Co-author of the new Topside musical Kingdom Come, with music by George Gershwin. Ricky’s special guest, Scheherazade Ginsberg. Now, here’s Ricky, so let’s GET IT ON!”