An hour later, the three entered the bishop's cabin and sat down at the bare round table in its center. Carmody was carrying a little black bag, which he put under his chair without commenting on it. All were dressed in black robes, and as soon as André had given the opening ritual prayer, they put on the masks of the founder of the order. For a moment there was silence as they looked at each other from behind the assumed anonymous safety of identical features; brown skin, kinky hair, flat nose, thick lips. And with the intense West Africanness of the face, the maker of the masks had managed to impart to them the legendary gentleness and nobility of soul that had belonged to Jairus Cbwaka.
Captain Tu spoke through rigid lips.
"We are gathered here in the name of His love and of His love to formulate the temptation, if any, that confronts us, and take action, if any, against it. Let us speak as brothers, remembering each time we look across the table and see the face of the founder that he never lost his temper except upon one occasion nor forgot his love except on one occasion. Let us remember his agonies caused by that forgetfulness and what he has directed us, priest and layman, to do. Let us be worthy of his spirit in the presence of the seeming of his flesh."
"I would like it better if you didn't rattle through the words so fast," said the bishop. "Such a pace destroys the spirit of the thing."
"It doesn't remedy anything for you to criticize my conducting."
"Rebuke well taken. I ask you to forgive me."
"Of course," Tu said, somewhat uncomfortably. "Of course. Well to business."
"I speak for Father," said the bishop.
"I speak against Father," said Carmody.
"Speak for Father," said Tu.
"Thesis: Father represents the forces of good. He has offered the Church the monopoly of the secret of resurrection."
"Antithesis."
"Father represents the forces of evil, for he will unloose upon the Galaxy a force which will destroy the Church if she tries to monopolize it. Moreover, even if she should refuse to have anything to do with it, it will destroy mankind everywhere and consequently our Church."
"Development of thesis."
"All his actions have been for good. Point. He has cured our illnesses major and minor. Point. He stopped Masters and Lejeune from carnal intercourse and perhaps did the same to Recka and Givens. Point. He made the former confess they had stolen money from Lejeune's father, and since then Lejeune has come to me for spiritual advice. She seemed to consider very seriously my suggestion that she have nothing to do with Masters and to return to her father, if the chance came, in an attempt to solve their problems with his consent. Point. She is studying a manual I gave her and may be led to the Church. That will be Father's doing and not Masters', who has neglected the Church though he is nominally a member of our body. Point. Father is forgiving, for he didn't allow the leopardess to harm Masters, even after the youth's attempt at killing him. And he has said that the captain may as well release Masters from the brig, for he fears nothing, and our criminal code is beneath his comprehension. He is sure that Masters won't try again. Therefore, why not forget about his stealing a gun from the ship's storeroom and let him loose? We are using force to get our goal of punishment, and that is not necessary, for according to the laws of psycho-dynamics which he has worked out during ten thousand years of solitude, a person who uses violence as a means to an end is self-punished, is robbed of a portion of his powers. Even his original act of getting the ship down here has hurt him so much that it will be some time before he recovers the full use of his psychic energies.
"I enter a plea that we accept his offer. There can be no harm because he wishes to go as a passenger. Though I, of course, possess no personal funds, I will write out an authorization on the Order for his ticket. And I will take his place upon Abatos while he is gone.
"Remember, too, that the decision of this particular Council will not commit the Church to accept his offer. We will merely put him under our patronage for a time."
"Antithesis."
"I have a blanket statement that will answer most of thesis's points. That is, that the worst evil is that which adopts the lineaments of good, so that one has to look hard to distinguish the true face beneath the mask. Father undoubtedly learned from the Hoyle survivor our code of ethics. He has avoided close contact with us so we may not get a chance to study his behaviour in detail.
"However, these are mostly speculations. What can't be denied is that this act of resurrection is a drug, the most powerful and insidious that mankind has ever been exposed to. Once one has known the ecstasies attendant upon it, one wishes for more. And as the number of such acts is limited to the number of dead available, one wishes to enlarge the ranks of the dead so that one may enjoy more acts. And Father's set-up here is one that `combines the maximum of temptation with the maximum of opportunity.' Once a man has tasted the act, he will seriously consider turning his world into one like Abatos.
"Do we want that? I say no. I predict that if Father leaves here, he will open the way to such a possibility. Won't each man who has the power begin thinking of himself as a sort of god? Won't he become as Father, dissatisfied with the original unruly rude chaotic planet as he found it? Won't he find progress and imperfection unbearable and remodel the bones of his creatures to remove all evolutionary vestiges and form perfect skeletons? Won't he suppress mating among the animals—and perhaps among his fellow human beings—while allowing the males to die unresurrected until none but the more pliable and amenable females are left and there is no chance of young being born? Won't he make a garden out of his planet, a beautiful but sterile and unprogressive paradise? Look, for example, at the method of hunting that the fat and lazy beasts of prey use. Consider its disastrous results, evolutionarily speaking. In the beginning they picked out the slowest and stupidest herbivores to kill. Did this result in the survivors breeding swifter and more intelligent young? Not at all. For the dead were raised, and caught and killed again. And again. So that now when a leopardess or bitch wolf goes out to eat, the unconditioned run away and the conditioned stand trembling and paralysed and meekly submit to slaughter like tame animals in a stockyard. And the uneaten return to graze unconcernedly within leaping distance of the killer while she is devouring their sister. This is a polished planet, where the same event slides daily through the same smooth groove.
"Yet even the lover of perfection, Father, has become bored and wishes to find a pioneer world where he may labour until he has brought it to the same state as Abatos. Will this go on for ever until the Galaxy will no longer exhibit a multitude of worlds, each breathtakingly different from the other, but will show you everywhere a duplicate of Abatos, not one whit different? I warn you that this is one of the very real perils.
"Minor points. He is a murderer because he caused Kate Lejeune to miscarry, and . . ."
"Counterpoint. He maintains that it was an accident that Kate lost her foetus, that he had his two beasts chase her and Masters out of the woods because they were having carnal intercourse. And he could not tolerate that. Point. Such an attitude is in his favour and shows that he is good and on the side of the Church and of God."
"Point. It would not have mattered to him if Pete and Kate had been bound in holy matrimony. Carnal intercourse per se is objectionable to him. Why, I don't know. Perhaps the act offends his sense of property because he is the sole giver of life on this world. But I say his interference was evil because it resulted in the lost of a human life, and that he knew it would . . ."
"Point," said the bishop, somewhat heatedly. "This is, as far as we know, a planet without true death and true sin. We have brought those two monsters with us, and he cannot endure either one."
"Point. We did not ask to come but were forced."
"Order," said the moderator. "The Question first, then the formulation of the temptation, as laid down in the rules. If we say yes, and Father goes with us, one of us must remain to take his place. Otherwise, so he insists, this world will go to wrack and ruin in his absence."
The moderator paused, then said, "For some reason, he has limited the choice of his substitutes to you two."
"Point," said the bishop. "We are the only candidates because we have sworn total abstinence from carnal intercourse. Father seems to think that women are even greater vessels of evil than men. He says that bodily copulation involves a draining off of the psychic energy needed for the act of resurrection and implies also that there is something dirty—or perhaps I should say, just too physical and animal—about the act. I do not, of course, think his attitude entirely justified, nor do I agree at all that women are on the same plane with animals. But you must remember that he has not seen a woman for ten thousand years, that perhaps the female of his own species might justify his reaction. I gathered from his conversation that there is a wide gap between the sexes of his kind on his home planet. Even so, he is kind to our women passengers. He will not touch them, true, but he says that any physical contact with us is painful to him, because it robs him of his, what shall I say, sanctity? On the other hand, with flowers and trees . . ."
"Point. What you have told us indicates his aberrated nature."
"Point, point. You have confessed you dare not say such a thing to his face, that you are awed by the sense of the power that emanates from him. Point. He acts as one who has taken a vow of chastity; perhaps his nature is such that too close a contact does besmirch him, figuratively speaking. I take this religious attitude to be one more sign in his favour."
"Point. The devil himself may be chaste. But for what reason? Because he loves God or because he fears dirt?"
"Time," said Tu, "time for the chance of reversal. Has thesis or antithesis altered his mind on any or all points? Do not be backward in admitting it. Pride must fall before love of truth."
The bishop's voice was firm. "No change. And let me reaffirm that I do not think Father is God. But he has Godlike powers. And the Church should use them."
Carmody rose and gripped the table's edge. His head was thrust aggressively forward, his stance was strange in contrast to the tender melancholy of the mask.
"Antithesis reports no change, too. Very well. Thesis has stated that Father has Godlike powers. I say, so has man, within limits. Those limits are what he may do to material things through material means. I say that Father is limited to those means, that there is nothing at all supernatural about his so-called miracles. As a matter of fact, man can do what Father is doing, even if on a primitive scale.
"I have been arguing on a spiritual level, hoping to sway thesis with spiritual points before I revealed to you my discoveries. But I have failed. Very well. I will tell you what I have found out. Perhaps then thesis will change his mind."
He stooped and picked up the little black bag and laid it on the table before him. While he spoke, he kept one hand upon it, as if to enforce attention towards it.
"Father's powers, I thought, might be only extensions of what we humans may do. His were more subtle because he had the backing of a much older science than ours. After all, we are able to rejuvenate the old so that our life span is about a hundred and fifty. We build organs of artificial flesh. Within a limited period we may revive the dead, provided we can freeze them quickly enough and then work on them. We've even built a simple brain of flesh—one on the level of a toad's. And the sense of the numinous and of panic is nothing new. We have our own sonobeams for creating a like effect. Why could he not be using similar methods?
"Just because we saw him naked and without a machine in his hand didn't mean that his effects were produced by mental broadcast. We couldn't conceive of science without metal mechanisms. But what if he had other means? What about the jelly trees, which display electromagnetic phenomena? What about the faint humming we heard?
"So I borrowed a microphone and oscilloscope from the engineer, rigged up a sound detector, put it in the bag, and set out to nose around. And I observed that His Excellency was also making use of his time before the Question, that he was talking again to him. And while doing so, the jelly trees nearby were emitting subsonics at four and thirteen cycles. You know what those do. The first massages the bowels and causes peristalsis. The second stimulates a feeling of vague overpowering oppression. There were other sonics, too, some sub, some super.
"I left Father's neighbourhood to investigate elsewhere. Also, to do some thinking. It's significant, I believe, that we have had little chance or inclination to do any meditating since we've been here. Father has been pushing us, has kept us off balance. Obviously, he wants to keep our minds blurry with too rapid a pace of events.
"I did some fast thinking, and I concluded that the resurrection act itself was not touched off by his spark of genesis. Far from it. It is completely automatic, and it comes when the newly formed body is ready for a shock of bio-electricity from the protoplasm-jelly.
"But he knows when it is ready and taps the wavelengths of life blooming anew, feeds upon them. How? There must be a two-way linkage between his brainwaves and the jelly's. We know that we think in symbols, that a mental symbol is basically a complex combination of brainwaves issuing as series of single images. He triggers off certain pre-set mechanisms in the jelly with his thoughts, that is, with a mental projection of a symbol.
"Yet not anyone may do it, for we two priests, dedicated to abstention from carnal intercourse, were the only ones able to tap in on the waves. Evidently, a man has to have a peculiar psychosomatic disposition. Why? I don't know. Maybe there is something spiritual to the process. But don't forget that the devil is spiritual. However, the mind-body's actions are still a dark continent. I can't solve them, only speculate.
"As for his ability to cure illnesses at a distance, he must diagnose and prescribe through the medium of the tree-jelly. It receives and transmits, takes in the abnormal or unhealthy waves our sick cells broadcast and sends out the healthy waves to suppress or cancel the unhealthy. There's no miracle about the process. It works in accordance with materialistic science.
"I surmise that when Father first came here, he was fully aware that the trees originated the ecstasy, that he was merely tuning in. But after millennia of solitude and an almost continuous state of drugging ecstasy, he deluded himself into thinking that it was he who sparked the new life.
"There are a few other puzzling points. How did he catch our ship? I don't know. But he knew about the translator motor from the Hoyle survivor and was thus able to set up the required wavelengths to neutralize the workings of the protein `normal space' memory banks. He could have had half the jelly trees of Abatos broadcasting all the time, a trap that would inevitably catch a passing ship."
Tu said, "What happened to his original spaceship?"
"If we left the Gull to sit out in the rain and sun for ten thousand years, what would happen to it?"
"It'd be a heap of rust. Not even that."
"Right. Now I suspect strongly that Father, when he first came here, had a well-equipped laboratory on his ship. His science was able to mutate genes at will, and he used his tools on the native trees to mutate them into these jelly trees. That also explains why he was able to change the animals' genetic pattern so that their bodies lost their evolutionary vestiges, became perfectly functional organisms."
The little man in the mask sat down. The bishop rose. His voice was choked.
"Admitting that your researches and surmises have indicated that Father's powers are unspiritual gimmickry—and in all fairness it must be admitted that you seem to be right—admitting this, then, I still speak for Father."
Carmody's mask cocked to the left. "What?"
"Yes. We owe it to the Church that she get this wonderful tool in her hands, this tool which, like anything in this universe, may be used for evil or for good. Indeed, it is mandatory that she gets control of it, so that she may prevent those who would misuse it from doing so, so that she may become stronger and attract more to her fold. Do you think that eternal life is no attraction?
"Now—you say that Father has lied to us. I say he has not. He never once told us that his powers were purely spiritual. Perhaps, being of an alien species, he misunderstands our strength of comprehension and took it for granted that we would see how he operates.
"However, that is not the essence of my thesis. The essence is that we must take Father along and give the Church a chance to decide whether or not to accept him. There is no danger in doing that, for he will be alone among billions. And if we should leave him here, then we will be open to rebuke, perhaps even a much stronger action from the Church, for having been cowards enough to turn down his gift.
"I will remain here, even though my motives are questioned by those who have no right to judge me. I am a tool of God as much as Father is; it is right that we both be used to the best of our abilities; Father is doing no good for Church or man while isolated here; I will endure my loneliness while waiting for your return with the thought that I am doing this as a servant who takes joy in his duty."
"What a joy!" Carmody shouted. "No! I say that we reject Father once and for all. I doubt very much that he will allow us to go, for he will think that, faced with spending the rest of our lives here and then dying—for I don't think he'll resurrect us unless we say yes—we will agree. And he'll see to it that we are cooped up inside the ship, too. We won't dare step outside, for we'll be bombarded with panic-waves or attacked by his beasts. However, that remains to be seen. What I'd like to ask thesis is this: Why can't we just refuse him and leave the problem of getting him off Abatos to some other ship? He can easily trap another. Or perhaps, if we get to go home, we may send a government craft to investigate."
"Father has explained to me that we represent his only sure chance. He may have to wait another ten millennia before another ship is trapped. Or forever. It works this way. You know that translation of a vessel from one point in normal space to the other occurs simultaneously, as far as outside observers are affected. Theoretically, the ship rotates the two coordinates of its special axis, ignoring time, disappears from its launching point, reappearing at the same time at its destination. However, there is a discharging effect, a simulacrum of the ship, built of electromagnetic fields, which radiates at six points from the starting place, and speeds at an ever-accelerating rate at six right-angles from there. These are called `ghosts.' They've never been seen, and we've no instrument that can detect them. Their existence is based on Guizot's equations, which have managed to explain how electromagnetic waves may exceed the speed of light, though we know from Auschweigh that Einstein was wrong when he said that the velocity of light was the absolute.
"Now, if you were to draw a straight line from Wildenwooly to Ygdrasil, you would find that Abatos does not lie between, that it is off to one side of the latter. But it is at right-angles to it, so that one of the `ghosts' passes here. The electromagnetic net that the trees sent up stopped it cold. The result was that the Gull was literally sucked along the line of power, following this particular ghost to Abatos instead of to Ygdrasil. I imagine that we appeared for a flickering millisecond at our original destination, then were yanked back to here. Of course, we were unaware of that, just as the people on Ygdrasil never saw us.
"Now—the voyages between Ygdrasil and Wildenwooly are infrequent, and the field has to mesh perfectly with the ghost, otherwise the ghost passes between the pulses. So that his chances of catching another are very few."
"Yes, and that is why he will never allow us to leave. If we go without him and send a warship back to investigate, it may be able to have defences built in to combat his trees' radiations. So we represent his sole ticket. And I say no even if we must remain marooned!"
So the talk raged for two hours until Tu asked for the final formulations.
"Very well. We have heard. Antithesis has stated the peril of the temptation as being one that will make man a sterile anarchistic pseudo-god.
"Thesis has stated that the peril is that we may reject a gift which would make our Church once again the universal, in numbers as well as in claim, because she would literally and physically hold the keys to life and death.
"Thesis, please vote."
"I say we accept Father's offer."
"Antithesis."
"No. Refuse."
Tu placed his large and bony hands on the table,
"As moderator and judge, I agree with antithesis."
He removed his mask. The others, as if reluctant to acknowledge both identity and responsibility, slowly took off their disguises. They sat glaring at each other, and ignored the captain when he cleared his throat loudly. Like the false faces they had discarded, they had dropped any pretence of brotherly love.
Tu said, "In all fairness, I must point out one thing. That is, that as a layman of the Church, I may concur in the agreement to reject Father as a passenger. But as a captain of the Saxwell Company's vessel, it is my duty when landing upon an unscheduled stop to take on any stranded non-active who wishes to leave, provided he has passage money and there is room for him. That is Commonwealth law."
"I don't think we need worry about anybody paying for his passage," said the padre. "Not now. However, if he should have the money, he'd present you with a nice little dilemma."
"Yes, wouldn't he? I'd have to report my refusal, of course. And I'd face trial and might lose my captaincy and would probably be earthbound the rest of my life. Such a thought is—well, unendurable."
André rose. "This has been rather trying. I think I'll go for a walk in the woods. If I meet Father, I will tell him our decision."
Tu also stood up. "The sooner the better. Ask him to reactivate our translator at once. We won't even bother leaving in orthodox style. We'll translate and get our fixings later. Just so we get away."
Carmody fumbled in his robe for a cigarette. "I think I'll talk to Pete Masters. Might be able to drive some sense into his head. Afterwards, I'll take a walk in the woods, too. There's much hereabouts to learn yet."
He watched the bishop walk out and grimly shook his head.
"It went hard to go against my superior," he said to Tu. "But His Excellency, though a great man, is lacking in the understanding that comes from having sinned much yourself."
He patted his round paunch and smiled as if all were right, though not very convincingly.
"It's not fat alone that is stuffed beneath my belt. There are years of experience of living in the depths packed solidly there. Remember that I survived Dante's Joy. I've had my belly full of evil. At its slightest taste, I regurgitate it. I tell you, Captain, Father is rotten meat, ten thousand years old."
"You sound as if you're not quite certain."
"In this world of shifting appearances and lack of true self-knowledge, who is?"