Picture this: A mountain splintering the sky like a broken bone, its western precipice plummeting onto jumbled scree. - Sheri S. Tepper

We obey orders, and we don’t ask if the officer is crazy or not!

The tallest Father preached. He stood before us in robes of gleaming white, surrounded by the smoke of sweet incense, fondling his groin from time to time as he talked of St. Phallus. St. Phallus loomed behind the altar, erect, massive, as though ready to rape the world. It was not the first such monument I had seen. Wherever men were ignorant and hungry for power, I had seen these things, though never one as large as this. Father fondled his groin and preached.
“Holy fruit of St. Phallus,” he said.
“Clean seed planted in filthy ground,” he said.
“Corrupted by dirty woman-wombs,” he said.

Though he was very young, only in his early twenties, he had enormous charisma. This attribute alone made him believable in the way that actors and demagogues are believable: he was so overwhelmingly convincing he was never required to demonstrate relevance.