Stranger in a Strange Land (46 page)

Patricia Paiwonski took a deep breath. She had made such a decision before . . . with her husband watching ... had not funked it. Who was she to refuse a holy man? And this blessed bride? “I want it,” she said firmly.

Jill took a sip. “We grow ever closer.” She passed the glass to Mike.

“I thank you for water, my brother.” He took a sip. “Pat, I give you the water of life. May you always drink deep.” He passed the glass to her.

Patricia took it. “Thank you. Thank you, oh my dears! The ‘water of life'—I love you both!” She drank thirstily.

Jill took the glass, finished it. “Now we grow closer, my brothers.”

Michael lifted his new brother, wafted her in and placed her gently on the bed.

Valentine Michael Smith grokked that physical human love—very human and very physical—was not simply a quickening of eggs, nor was it ritual through which one grew closer; the act
itself
was a growing-closer. He was still grokking it, trying at every opportunity to grok its fullness. He had long since quit shying away from his strong suspicion that even the Old Ones did not know
this
ecstasy—he grokked that his new people held spiritual depths unique. Happily he tried to sound them, with no childhood inhibitions to cause him guilt nor reluctance of any sort.

His human teachers, gentle and generous, had instructed his innocence without bruising it. The result was as unique as he was.

Jill was unsurprised to find that Patty accepted with forthright fullness that sharing water with Mike in a very ancient Martian ceremony led at once to sharing Mike himself in an ancient human rite. Jill was somewhat surprised at Pat's calm acceptance when Mike proved capable of miracles here, too. But Jill did not know that Patricia had met a holy man before—she
expected
more of holy men. Jil! was serenely happy that a cusp had been met with right action . . . then was ecstatically happy to grow closer herself.

When they rested, Jill had Mike treat Patty to a bath by telekinesis, and squealed and giggled when the older woman did. Mike had done it playfully for Jill on the initial occasion; it had become a family custom, one that Jill knew Patty would like. It tickled Jill to see Patty's face when she found herself scrubbed by invisible hands, then dried with neither towel nor air blast.

Patricia blinked. “After that I need a drink.”

“Certainly, darling.”

“And I
still
want to show you kids my pictures.” They went into the living room and Patty stood in the middle of the rug. “First look at me. At
me
, not my pictures. What do you see?”

Mike stripped off her tattoos in his mind and looked at his new brother without her decorations. He liked her tattoos; they set her apart and made her a self. They gave her a slightly Martian flavor, she did not have the bland sameness of most humans. He thought of having himself tattooed all over, once he grokked what should be pictured. The life of his father, water brother Jubal? He would ponder it. Jill might wish to be tatooed, too. What designs would make Jill more beautifully Jill?

What he saw when he looked at Pat without tattoos pleased him not as much; she looked as a woman must look to be woman. Mike still did not grok Duke's collection of pictures; they had taught him that there was variety in sizes, shapes, and colors of women and some variety in the acrobatics of love—but beyond this he seemed to grok nothing to learn from Duke's prized pictures. Mike's training had made him an exact observer, but that same training had left him unresponsive to the subtle pleasures of voyeurism. It was not that he did not find women (including, emphatically, Patricia Paiwonski) sexually stimulating, but it lay not in seeing them. Smell and touch counted more—in which he was quasi-human, quasi-Martian; the parallel Martian reflex (as unsubtle as a sneeze) was triggered by those senses but could activate only in season—“sex” in a Martian was as romantic as intravenous feeding.

With her pictures gone, Mike noted more sharply one thing: Patricia had her own face, marked in beauty by her life. She had, he saw with wonder, her own face even more than Jill had. It made him feel toward Pat even more of an emotion he did not as yet call love.

She had her own odor, too, and her own voice. Her voice was husky, he liked hearing it even when he did not grok her meaning; her odor was mixed with a trace of bitter muskiness from handling snakes. Mike liked her snakes and could handle the poisonous ones—not alone by stretching time to avoid their strikes. They grokked with him; he savored their innocent merciless thoughts—they reminded him of home. Mike was the only other person who could handle Honey Bun with pleasure to the boa constrictor. Her torpor was such that others could handle her—but Mike she accepted as a substitute for Pat.

Mike let the pictures reappear.

Jill wondered why Aunt Patty had let herself be tattooed? She would look rather nice—if she weren't a living comic strip. But she loved Patty herself, not the way she looked—and it did give her a steady living ... until she got so old that marks wouldn't pay to see her even if those pictures had been by Rembrandt. She hoped that Patty was tucking away plenty in the grouch bag—then remembered that Aunt Patty was now a water brother and shared Mike's endless fortune. Jill felt warmed by it.

“Well?” repeated Mrs. Paiwonski. “What do you see? How old am I, Michael?”

“I don't know.”

“Guess.”

“I can't, Pat.”

“Oh, go ahead!”

“Patty,” Jill put in, “he really can't. He hasn't learned to judge ages—you know how short a time he's been on Earth. And Mike thinks in Martian years and Martian arithmetic. If it's time or figures, I do it for him.”

“Well . . . you guess, hon. Be truthful.”

Jill looked Patty over, noting her trim figure but also hands and throat and eyes—then discounted by five years despite the honesty owed a water brother. “Mmm, thirtyish, give or take a year.”

Mrs. Paiwonski chortled. “That's one bonus of the True Faith, my dears! Jill hon, I'm crowding fifty.”

“You don't look it!”

“That's what Happiness does, dearie. After my first kid, I let my figure go to pot—they invented the word ‘broad' just for me. My belly looked like six months gone. My busts hung down—and I've never had 'em lifted. You can see for yourself—sure, a good surgeon doesn't leave a scar . . . but on
me
it would
show,
dear; it would chop holes in two pictures.

“Then I seen the light! Nope, not exercise, not diet—I eat like a pig. Happiness, dear. Perfect Happiness in the Lord through the help of Blessed Foster.”

“It's amazing,” said Jill. Aunt Patty certainly had not dieted nor exercised during the time she had known her, and Jill knew what was excised in breast-lifting; those tatoos had never known a knife.

Mike assumed that Pat had learned to think her body as she wished it, whether she attributed it to Foster or not. He was teaching this control to Jill, but she would have to perfect her knowledge of Martian before it could be perfect. No hurry, waiting would do it. Pat went on:

“I wanted you to
see
what Faith can do. But the real change is inside. Happiness. The good Lord knows I'm not gifted with tongues but I'll try to tell you. First you've got to realize that all other so-called churches are traps of the Devil. Our dear Jesus preached the True Faith, so Foster said and I truly believe. But in the Dark Ages his words were twisted and changed until Jesus wouldn't recognize 'em. So Foster was sent to proclaim a New Revelation and make it clear again.”

Patricia Paiwonski pointed her finger and suddenly was a priestess clothed in holy dignity and mystic symbols. “God wants us to be Happy. He filled the world with things to make us Happy. Would God let grape juice turn to wine if He didn't want us to drink and be joyful? He could let it stay grape juice . . . or turn it into vinegar that nobody could get a giggle out of. Ain't that
true?
Of course He don't mean we should get roaring drunk and beat your wife and neglect your kids . . . He gave us good things to
use
, not abuse. If you feel like a drink or six, among friends who have seen the light, and it makes you want to dance and give thanks to the Lord for His goodness—why not? God made alcohol and God made feet—He made 'em so you could put 'em together and be Happy!”

She paused. “Fill 'er up again, honey; preaching is thirsty work—not much ginger ale; that's good rye. And that ain't all. If God didn't want women to be looked at, He would have made 'em ugly—that's reasonable, isn't it? God isn't a cheat; He set up the game Himself—He wouldn't rig it so that the marks can't win, like a flat joint wheel in a town with a fix on. He wouldn't send anybody to Hell for losing in a crooked game.

“All right! God wants us to be Happy and He told us how: ‘Love one another!' Love a snake if the poor thing needs love. Love thy neighbor . . . and the back of your hand only to Satan's corruptors who want to lead you away from the appointed path and down into the pit. And by ‘love' He didn't mean nambypamby old-maid love that's scared to look up from a hymn book for fear of seeing a temptation of the flesh. If God hated flesh,
why did He make so much of it?
God is no sissy. He made the Grand Canyon and comets coursing through the sky and cyclones and stallions and earthquakes—can a God who can do all that turn around and practically wet His pants just because some little sheila leans over a mite and a man catches sight of a tit? You know better, hon—and so do I! When God told us to love, He wasn't holding out a card on us; He
meant
it. Love little babies that always need changing and love strong, smelly men so that there will be more babies to love—and in between go on loving because it's so
good
to love!

“Of course that don't mean to peddle it any more than a bottle of rye means I gotta get fighting drunk and clobber a cop. You can't sell love and you can't buy Happiness, no price tags on either . . . and if you think there is, the way to Hell lies open. But if you give with an open heart and receive what God has an unlimited supply of, the Devil can't touch you. Money?” She looked at Jill. “Hon, would you do that water-sharing thing with somebody, say for a million dollars? Make it ten million, tax free.”

“Of course not.”
(“Michael,
do you grok this?”)

“You see, dearie? I knew love was in that water. You're seekers, very near the light. But since you two, from the love that is in you, did ‘share water and grow closer,' as Michael says, I can tell you things I couldn't ordinarily tell a seeker—”

 

The Reverend Foster, self-ordained—or ordained by God, depending on authority cited—had an instinct for the pulse of his times stronger than that of a skilled carnie sizing up a mark. The culture known as “America” had a split personality throughout its history. Its laws were puritanical; its covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were Apollonian; its revivals were almost Dionysian. In the twentieth century (Terran Christian Era) nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed—and nowhere was there such deep interest in it.

Foster had in common with every great religious leader of that planet two traits: he had an extremely magnetic personality, and sexually he did not fall near the human norm. On Earth great religious leaders were always either celibate or the antithesis. Foster was not celibate.

Nor were his wives and priestesses—the clincher for rebirth under the New Revelation included a ritual uniquely suited for growing closer.

In Terran history, many cults had used the same technique—but not on a major scale in America before Foster's time. Foster was run out of town more than once before he perfected a method that permitted him to expand his capric cult. He borrowed from Freemasonry, Catholicism, the Communist Party, and Madison Avenue just as he borrowed from earlier scriptures in composing his New Revelation. He sugar-coated it all as a return to primitive Christianity. He set up an outer church which anybody could attend. Then there was a middle church, which to outward appearance was “The Church of the New Revelation,” the happy saved, who paid tithes, enjoyed all benefits of the church's ever-widening business tie-ins, and whooped it up in an endless carnival of Happiness, Happiness, Happiness! Their sins were forgiven—and very little was sinful as long as they supported their church, dealt honestly with fellow Fosterites, condemned sinners, and stayed Happy. The New Revelation did not specifically encourage lechery, but it got quite mystical in discussing sexual conduct.

The middle church supplied shock troops. Foster borrowed a trick from early-twentieth-century Wobblies; if a community tried to suppress a Fosterite movement, Fosterites converged on that town until neither jails nor cops could handle them—cops had ribs kicked in and jails were smashed.

If a prosecutor was rash enough to push an indictment, it was impossible to make it stick. Foster (after learning under fire) saw to it that prosecutions were persecution under the letter of the law; no conviction of a Fosterite
qua
Fosterite was ever upheld by the Supreme Court—nor, later, by the High Court.

Inside the overt church was the Inner Church—a hard core of fully dedicated who made up the priesthood, the lay leaders, all keepers of keys and makers of policy. They were “reborn,” beyond sin, certain of heaven, and sole celebrants of the inner mysteries.

Foster selected these with great care, personally until the operation got too big. He looked for men like himself and for women like his priestess-wives—dynamic, utterly convinced, stubborn, and free (or able to be freed, once guilt and insecurity were purged) of jealousy in its most human meaning—and all of them potential satyrs and nymphs, as the secret church was that Dionysian cult that America had lacked and for which there was enormous potential market.