“Maybe not . . . in these circumstances.” But then I thought, well, what the hell? Let’s tell the truth, and get it over with.
“Actually,” I said, “most times, this is just the point we get called in. Maybe a bit before. There’s a prodromic phase, and then there’s this. Manifestation. This is where the game gets dirty.” I gave him a look. “You want to stop, then here’s the time.”
He gave a quick shake of the head.
I said, “If you use anything they don’t like—the bigwigs at the Registry—you know they’ll slap you with a lawsuit so fast you won’t even get your Herzog moment?”
“Just for the archives.” He smiled, beckoning me on.
“You did the exhibition. You know how it works.”
“I know what was in the exhibition. I don’t know the rest.”
I sighed. I said, for the camera, “OK. Most of the time, you get gods, they’ve been in one place for, oh, a thousand years. Maybe more. Genius loci, right? Spirits of place. Some of them we just mop up while they’re quiescent, nice and easy. Other times, they’re waking up. A bit of poltergeist activity, bit of weirdness . . . when they start being a nuisance, that’s when we get called.
“Bear in mind, these places have a history. Sometimes they’re sacred spots. Often it’s the priest who calls us in. Which makes it easier.”
“But not here.”
“No. Not here.”
We waited for a moment.
“You can see the way it starts, back in the mists of history. Place gets a reputation. Soon it’s a shrine or sacred grove, somewhere people go to get a bit of something strange—contact the beyond, all that. Cheaper than drugs. Then someone builds a temple. Next thing, there’s a bunch of monks comes by, everyone’s converted, and, lo and behold, it’s a church. Doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing underneath. In the earth, in the rock, in the soil. They go to ground, the gods. Don’t stir for centuries. They feed on psychic power, as near as we can see. Emotion. Feeling. So any church that generates a bit of fervor . . .”
“This one must be in its element, then.”
“Yeah, but it’s probably not local. At a guess, I’d say . . .”
But I grew wary of the camera once more, and of what I was about to say.
Angel, sat back, sipped her coffee, and said, “Well, either tell him or don’t.”
I hesitated.
I remembered Silverman in Melody’s apartment, freaked out and thrown into a crazy situation. But he’d handled it. He’d handled it.
I told him, “Turn the camera off.”
“But—”
“Turn it off, or we change the subject. OK?”
He turned the camera off.
“Some history. Prehistory, more like.” I eyed the camera again. The light was off, but he set it on the tabletop, to reassure me. “What we call gods are agglomerations of energy. We’re not sure where they came from, but it seems they have, or had, some sort of relationship with us, which may have a connection with our own evolutionary development. Maybe we were symbiotes, once upon a time. Or parasites. Whatever the link, it’s an old one, and they get stronger when we take an interest in them. They like attention. Most people don’t realize they’re there, but we have instruments—”
“Readers,” he said.
“Yeah. So, we go round, we drain the gods. You did your exhibition. Twenty, thirty years, we’ve supplemented the domestic grid with that. Electric power, right from the gods. This wasn’t widely publicized. Always a bit of trouble with that word ‘gods,’ you know? Especially over here.”
“But,” he said.
“It seems we have a situation now where somebody—we don’t know who—is passing around pieces of a god. Or gods. You saw the end result, back in New York. I think this is probably another one, right here.”
“The miracle cure? Div, divinity?”
“I’d say that’s more of same. And so is this, that we’ve got here.”
Silverman watched me for a long time. Then he asked the one question that I’d rather he hadn’t.
“These pieces of god. They’re Registry, aren’t they?”
“I don’t know yet. They’re doing an analysis on what we got from Melody. I don’t know the results.”
“But you can guess.”
He’d taken a while to get up to speed, but he was there now. I thought I’d probably preferred him ignorant.
“So. The power from the Registry. It’s not contained, like we were told it is.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s not safe, either.”
“Nothing’s safe. You know how many people died in coal mines?”
“I’m just trying to get a clearer picture here,” he said.
One hand twitched towards his camera, but I shook my head.
“All right,” I said. “You probably know this, but for a long time, if we used a god for power, then that was it: no more god. Another limited resource. At the Indiana facility, and later, in Chicago, they tried a different tack, just bleeding off the power intermittently. Small, steady supply. It was . . . problematic. But it meant that, for a time, we had a stock of god-matter. Divinity in physical form.”