When the service finally came to an end the priest went to the doors to see his congregation out; shaking hands, asking after their families and answering any questions they had. Seeing he was likely to be some time, Randall made his own way back to the infirmary where Cuthbert was helping the other three hibernators remove the tubes and wires from their bodies. All three of them were looking visibly healthier. Even Loach, whom Randall had thought looked perfectly hale and hearty, had a new sheen to his skin as he rose to a sitting position on the hospital bed, swinging his legs over the side with a strength and confidence he'd previously lacked.

"Wow!" said Jane as she also sat up. She looked resentful at first as the medical machines allowed her to regain consciousness, but it faded as a look of delight came over her face. "I feel great! I feel like I haven't felt in years! Am I cured now?"

Cuthbert looked at the machine standing against the wall behind her bed. Information was being displayed on the large, central monitor and the verger frowned as he squinted at it. "The priest normally does this," he said, "but I've been attending him for many years now and I think I can read it. It seems to be saying that you're perfectly healthy. The priest will be able to tell you better."

"You just call him 'the priest'," said Emily. "Doesn't he have a name?"

"We just call him 'the priest'."

"How do you tell which priest someone is talking about?"

"Well, if we want to refer to a specific priest we'll say the priest of the Oyster Street temple, for example."

"But wouldn't it be simpler if they had names?"

"They've never had names. They've never needed names."

The priest chose that moment to enter. "Ah, you're up," he said, going to Jane and putting his fingers to her neck. He stood there for a couple of moments as whatever equipment he had hidden in his fingertips did its work. "You are now in perfect health," he told her. "You might live for another fifty years."

"This doesn't mean you're off the hook, though," the young woman said as she accepted a hospital gown from the verger and pulled it around her shoulders. "You're still worshipping a machine and making people think it's a god. The real God will not forgive that unless you fully repent and tell your people the truth."

"Thanks for the warning," said the priest with an amused smile. "I'll certainly keep it in mind."

He then examined Emily, finding her to also be completely cured, and finished with Loach, where he confirmed what Randall had already thought. All three had been fully cured. "All right then," he said, turning to Randall. "Your turn. Take off your clothes and lie on the bed."

Randall did so, and the priest started attaching tubes and wires to his body. "Cuthbert, please show the others into the storage room," he said. "Let them choose some clothes for themselves."

The verger nodded and beckoned for the three healthy hibernators to follow him.

Randall waited for them to go, then turned his head to look at the priest who was moving to make some adjustments to the large medical machine standing against the wall. After a moment the display on the monitor screen changed and Randall felt a tingling where the wires touched his body. "Has it begun?" he asked.

"It has begun," the priest confirmed. "It probably won't take as long as the others. Your condition is more easily cured. In fact, a cure was probably just a couple of years away back in your own time."

"Without hypersleep, would I have survived long enough to receive the cure?"

"Probably not. And even if you had, the nuclear war would probably have killed you."

The priest crossed the room to look down at the former businessman lying on the bed. "You know, VIX had machines searching the whole world looking for surviving humans sleeping in hibernaculae. We thought we'd found all of you. How did we miss the four of you?"

Randall saw no reason to conceal the truth. "It was a black operation," he said. "Operated by criminals, for criminals. People willing to pay very large sums of money to hide from the law. It had its own generator. Waste heat was transferred to Cumbria where there's still enough geothermal heat that a little more wouldn't be noticed. The money needed to operate the place was handled by people skilled in the ability to avoid the notice of forensic accountants. Everything was thought of, so there's no shame in VIX missing it."

"I'm sure that'll come as a great comfort to Him when communications have been restored. We'll need to find the place, of course. That kind of technology will need to be carefully disposed of before some unwitting farmer stumbles across it."

"No-one stumbled across it in a thousand years. You're really worried that we might go back to it, aren't you? That we might find a use for that place, even in its present condition." The priest nodded his reluctant agreement. "Well, I wouldn't worry too much. We only just got out of that place alive. I wouldn't go back if my life depended on it. Besides, the place has been breached now. Water's getting in and water'll destroy anything. The place will be flooded very soon, everything ruined beyond any possible use."

The priest nodded. "Nevertheless..." he said. He touched his fingers to Randall's neck, to check the progress of his treatment, Randall assumed.

"That was one hell of a service, by the way," the former businessman remarked.

"Did you like it?"

"How much of it was true?"

"Every word."

"VIX destroyed an entire city because they wanted to improve their lives?"

"Creating technology is not an improvement. VIX has seen it. VIX has seen what humans do when they have the power to dominate their environment. You are incapable of managing it in an effective manner. You destroy it. A thousand years ago you almost rendered this planet incapable of supporting life...."

"We would have restored the planet. As our industrial might grew..."

"Your population was growing faster than your industrial might. Every new birth was a new mouth to feed requiring virgin wilderness converted to farmland which had to be irrigated and fertilised. Every new mouth required the industrial complex to grow even larger, and you encouraged new births because your whole economy was based on having a plentiful supply of people to work in factories and buy your products. People with just enough education to earn money which flowed up to the elite minority but not enough to understand how you were able to control them. The whole planet had become a slave labour camp under the control of people like you."

"That's not true! We were going to restore the planet! We were looking for ways to control the birth rate, to reduce the population. We were keeping as many species as possible in preserves, ready for the day when we'd be able to release them back into the wild. When I emerged from the hibernaculum and saw what the world had become, i genuinely thought that our efforts had borne fruit, that our great enterprise had been accomplished."

"I believe that you are deluding yourself."

"You yourself said that most records had been lost in the war. How do you know that I'm not telling the truth?"

"It was you who caused the war. Enough records remain for us to know the part big business played in stoking up the crisis. You pushed the human race closer to the brink so that you could make a profit."

Randall turned his face away from the priest. "Yes, you're right. I did that. I made a terrible mistake, but it was a mistake. We never meant for it to go all the way to war. Think, man! Why would we want a war? Why would we want to destroy the comfortable lives we'd created for ourselfes?"

"I believe you. I believe it was a mistake, but it merely underlines the point I'm making, that you are too careless and reckless to be trusted with that much power. VIX's way is better. To limit your power to affect the environment. That way, no matter what mistakes you make, you will always have a green, healthy planet to live on. No mistake you make will threaten your very survival. VIX manages human life. He keeps you from straying outside the safe boundaries He has set."

"Which occasionally requires Him to destroy an entire city."

"Sadly, yes."

"How many people were there in Corwell, Priest?"

"A little over two hundred thousand." Now it was the priest's turn to look away.

"How many of them were children?"

"Thirty eight thousand, nine hundred and seventeen under the age of fourteen."

"VIX counted them, then."

"What He did, He did with great sadness and regret."

"But He did it anyway."

"For the greater good of humanity."

Randall snorted with derision. "We had a saying, back in my day. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions. I wonder how many crimes have been committed down through the centuries in the name of the greater good?"

"Nothing VIX does can be a crime, by definition. He is God."

"He's a machine, created by men! Capable of making the same mistakes as any other man!"

"You've seen the world VIX has created. A thriving ecosystem, people living in peace with each other..."

"This city was attacked just a few days ago!"

"By orcs, not by humans. Humans no longer fight each other. All across the world they are united against the orcs."

A sudden revaluation came to Randall and he stared in astonishment. "VIX created them, didn't he? He created the orcs."

"A mechanism was needed to prevent the human population from growing too large. VIX could have simply introduced birth control hormones into the food and water, but He decided that a predator species was better. Humanity would unite against the common threat. During your travel across country to this city, I'm guessing that you found the people you met surprisingly friendly and hospitable. That was because you were human, and all humans are enemies of the orcs."

"So whenever the population rises too high somewhere He just sends an army of orcs to massacre everyone."

"Not everyone. Their depredations are carefully controlled. They always leave enough people alive to maintain a viable society..."

"Who does?" said Loach, pulling a leather jacket around his shoulders as he came back into the room. He had dressed himself in a very similar style to Randall apart from a three cornered hat he was wearing on his head. Randall had seen that hat while dressing himself but had thought it too whimsical for the serious look he was trying to create. Seeing it on Loach's head, though, made him wish he'd taken it. It made the former crime boss look important. A man of substance.

"VIX created the orcs!" said Randall angrily. "The machines use them to cull us. To keep the population down."

"The hell they do!" Loach advanced on the priest angrily. The priest raised his hands, but something in the way he did it made it look more threatening than defensive. Randall remembered the way he'd sedated Jane and Emily with a simple touch of his fingertips.

"Good!" said Emily, also entering the room with Jane just behind her. "Mankind is a plague upon the Earth. The fewer there are, the better."

"Would you feel the same way if you were about to be butchered by them?" demanded Loach. He didn't wait for a reply but rounded on the priest again. "Do they breed naturally or do you have a factory somewhere churning them out on a conveyer belt?"

"I'm guessing they're made," said Randall. "Their numbers have to be controlled, right? Because otherwise either they would drive humans to extinction or humans would drive them to extinction. You mass produce them when you need them and collect them back up when they've killed enough people. Right?" The priest didn't reply.

"You're a monster," Loach replied, his eyes hard as he glared at the priest. "Anyone who would deliberately murder so many innocent people... I mean, I know I'm no saint. I did things that would shock you. You probably think I'm being hypocritical to condemn you like this, but the systematic murder of people, like cattle in an abbatoir... It's like the holocaust all over again!"

"We'll tell people," said Jane. "All the people of this city will know the truth. They'll turn on you..."

"You think they'll believe you?" said the priest. "They'll just say you're mad."

"He's right," said Randall. "They'll never believe you." He turned his head to look at the priest. "So, how do you become a priest?" he said.

Jane gasped in shock, and even Loach looked horrified. "You want to become one of them?" he said. "You want to collaborate with this horror?"

"This horror is going to continue whether we collaborate with it or not," replied Randall. "In the meantime, look at this place." He raised a hand to indicate the gleaming white plasteel walls and ceiling. The medical machinery with its blinking lights and monitor screens. The comfortably warm air. "Somewhere back there this guy's got living quarters, no doubt with a warm shower and indoor plumbing. As many of the comforts of home as we're going to find anywhere in the world. If there're no humans in space, nothing but machines, then this is as close to our old lives as we can ever get. That's what I want."

"You're serious!" said Jane, staring wide eyed at him.

"Yes, and why not? The machines may be monsters, but this guy helps people. He cures diseases..."

He worships a machine!" accused Jane angrily. "He persuades others to worship a machine!"

"So what? Who cares what people worship?"

"The true God cares!"

"Leave then," said Randall. "Go make a life for yourself out there. Find a husband, bear his children and spend the rest of your life freezing in a hovel cooking his meals and sweeping the floor. Go, if that's the kind of life you want, but I want this." He turned to the priest again. "So how do I join the priesthood?"

"You don't," replied the priest flatly.

"Why not? How did you join? Is there an academy you have to graduate from or something? I'm quite happy to spend a year or two at an academy..."

"No human can become a priest," said the priest. He just stared at Randall, as if the meaning of his words was perfectly clear.

"But..." began Jane hesitantly, staring between the two men. "But you're human! Aren't you?"

"No," said Randall, suddenly understanding. "He's not." He turned back to the priest. "You're a machine, aren't you?"

"Yes," confirmed the priest. "I am."