#186 - Religion
[Based on Here Comes Tomorrow timeline.]
When a whale died near the coast, they dragged it out of the sea an’ dug out its guts, hung a chandelier from the ribcage an’ tried to pray. Now, mostly people just live here. Or, like me, they come to think.
No-one pays any attention. I got an X on my belt: to them, I’m just another religion. A more violent one, but they ain’t scared of me. They’ve seen me before, at least once since they were born. The world’s getting to be a small place, and they know I ain’t diseased. But this time when I walk up the center aisle, they watch me go. They know my religion. They know something’s coming.
We hope it is.
The Cult of the Last Whale. That’s what they’re called. Y’can’t even smell the chemicals sealin’ in the hide over the tallow smoke. They dragged driftwood inside to make the pews, hammered out a shell casing and poked holes through it to burn the incense. It’s thick and enclosed and it stinks--but it’s as close to the house of an old friend as I’m going to get. Kurt Wagner’s been dead over eighty years. Christianity about the same, but the man kept his faith up until the end and we gave him his funeral. Always seemed peaceful around him, and that’s what I’m looking for now. The old graves are mostly gone. After Kitty we started burnin’ the dead. Couldn’t risk tombstones, couldn’t stand watchin’ them scavenge genetic material for the Dark Beast. ‘Dark Beast’-sounds like a joke, but if I ain’t gonna call him Hank McCoy, or Beast, then that’s what’s left.
I pretend I don’t hear the pew groan sharply when I drop onto it. I pretend I don’t see the puckered face to the left scowl at me when I hitch my feet up on the one in front and tug my hat down.
They still call us the X-Men. Of the old crew there’s me and the Cuckoos; Cassandra Nova and Martha. But we’re interspecies now, not just mutants. We still follow the dream, what they’re callin’ the ‘Xavier Creed’. And somehow we’ve become a friggin’ religion.
Oh Professor, look after us in our time of need. You know how hard that line is to take with a straight face? Took me ten years to stop snarling, after it stopped bein’ funny in a real un-amusing way. I knew the man; I watched him die, and I know better’n anyone he ain’t comin’ back to see this through. It doesn’t make any difference, they need faith in something. Charles Xavier had a dream, and he’s still got soldiers livin’ to fight for it. That’s made him the best god in town. I get to wonderin’, times like this, what he’d have thought of that. Tickled him pink deep down in his heart, I reckon; embarrassed to the roots of the hair he didn’t have. But faith or not, I’m still one of those soldiers, still standing in the dust we churned up going to war in the ruins. We’ve made a lot of stands; we’ve been on the cusp of victory and defeat more’n once in the last century and a half. And I’m one of six people who know that in this crazy religion, our god’s about to change. That the god we’re trying to find is real, burning real, and we haven’t got a clue whether she’s on our side after so long. We're in a lot of trouble if she ain't.
When a whale died near the coast, they dragged it out of the sea an’ dug out its guts, hung a chandelier from the ribcage an’ tried to pray. Now, mostly people just live here. Or, like me, they come to think.
No-one pays any attention. I got an X on my belt: to them, I’m just another religion. A more violent one, but they ain’t scared of me. They’ve seen me before, at least once since they were born. The world’s getting to be a small place, and they know I ain’t diseased. But this time when I walk up the center aisle, they watch me go. They know my religion. They know something’s coming.
We hope it is.
The Cult of the Last Whale. That’s what they’re called. Y’can’t even smell the chemicals sealin’ in the hide over the tallow smoke. They dragged driftwood inside to make the pews, hammered out a shell casing and poked holes through it to burn the incense. It’s thick and enclosed and it stinks--but it’s as close to the house of an old friend as I’m going to get. Kurt Wagner’s been dead over eighty years. Christianity about the same, but the man kept his faith up until the end and we gave him his funeral. Always seemed peaceful around him, and that’s what I’m looking for now. The old graves are mostly gone. After Kitty we started burnin’ the dead. Couldn’t risk tombstones, couldn’t stand watchin’ them scavenge genetic material for the Dark Beast. ‘Dark Beast’-sounds like a joke, but if I ain’t gonna call him Hank McCoy, or Beast, then that’s what’s left.
I pretend I don’t hear the pew groan sharply when I drop onto it. I pretend I don’t see the puckered face to the left scowl at me when I hitch my feet up on the one in front and tug my hat down.
They still call us the X-Men. Of the old crew there’s me and the Cuckoos; Cassandra Nova and Martha. But we’re interspecies now, not just mutants. We still follow the dream, what they’re callin’ the ‘Xavier Creed’. And somehow we’ve become a friggin’ religion.
Oh Professor, look after us in our time of need. You know how hard that line is to take with a straight face? Took me ten years to stop snarling, after it stopped bein’ funny in a real un-amusing way. I knew the man; I watched him die, and I know better’n anyone he ain’t comin’ back to see this through. It doesn’t make any difference, they need faith in something. Charles Xavier had a dream, and he’s still got soldiers livin’ to fight for it. That’s made him the best god in town. I get to wonderin’, times like this, what he’d have thought of that. Tickled him pink deep down in his heart, I reckon; embarrassed to the roots of the hair he didn’t have. But faith or not, I’m still one of those soldiers, still standing in the dust we churned up going to war in the ruins. We’ve made a lot of stands; we’ve been on the cusp of victory and defeat more’n once in the last century and a half. And I’m one of six people who know that in this crazy religion, our god’s about to change. That the god we’re trying to find is real, burning real, and we haven’t got a clue whether she’s on our side after so long. We're in a lot of trouble if she ain't.