The Cold Smell Of Sacred Stone

PROLOGUE

Garth's Credo, as it came to be called after it was codified by others, grew out of a body of offhand remarks, many delivered half in jest, that Garth made to reporters and other individuals after the "miracles" in an attempt to explain just what it was he thought he was up to. The Credo was simple, and he stuck to it consistently to the end, despite the fact that all during his long illness he was whacked to the gills on nitrophenylpentadienal. Spy dust.

His deeds and his motivation, Garth patiently explained, had nothing to do with altruism; his behavior was rooted in selfishness, for he had discovered that the only help for his own affliction was to attempt to alleviate the suffering of others, in whatever way he could. He was never quite certain what others meant when they talked about salvation, and he was certainly not seeking it for himself. He simply needed to nurse the fever of the world so that he could be at peace and sleep without the night terrors of his own fever dreams.

Personally, he no longer believed in God, a concept he now viewed as a dark fantasy, an ineradicable cave painting from the prehistoric nether world of racial memory, a kind of ambiguous and menacingly capricious Santa Claus for grownups, a superghost who in one hand carried a bagful of superpresents, like eternal life, for those who somehow managed to obey His remarkably confusing and often contradictory dictates, and a bagful of burning coal, superagony, in the other hand for those who didn't.

Once Garth had believed in God, but thinking back he realized that the God he had believed in had been a kind of ultimate secular humanist, with a gentle and abiding love for all people, patience with their folly, pride in humankind's accomplishments, and sorrow at their suffering. The God my brother had believed in had been a Creator, not an administrator or auditor, and had had no need to be noticed, much less worshiped; He certainly had no need to witness ritual posturing, and to demand it of the creatures of His creation would smack of pettiness and insecurity.

This being the case, the vast multitude of supernatural belief systems that had sprung, and continued to spring, from the fertile soil of the human imagination were at best irrelevant and a waste of time. At worst, they became licensed franchises of stupidity and fear where the product manufactured and delivered was a decidedly intoxicating but poisonous mush of intolerance, bigotry, hatred, stunting of the intellect, dehumanization of others outside the franchise, torture, and murder. Clearly, what these people thought was good for God was not good for people, an irony that must have sorely tested God's considerable sense of humor when He saw the first totem being erected, the first goat or child sacrificed before it. The God Garth had once believed in would not have been pleased.

In what eventually became known as the Dime and a Little Time Parable, Garth had idly wondered out loud what would happen if humankind decided to declare a kind of moratorium on its collective obsession with occult power for a decade or more, say until the year 2000. During this time, each day, every man, woman, and child on the face of the planet would donate ten minutes or the equivalent of ten cents in a personal attempt to better the lot of somebody, anybody, else who might need a hand to hold, or a slice of bread to eat.

Always, Garth prefaced these random thoughts by pointing out that he was no longer a member of any religious franchise and did not presume to speak to or for anyone. He did what he did simply to make himself feel better. Others could interpret his words as they saw fit; he had no preachments to make to anyone, no prescriptions for living for anyone but himself, no tickets to heaven-which he considered a myth anyway.

With that kind of crazy talk, it was probably no wonder that a lot of people would take into their heads the notion that my poisoned brother was the Messiah.