The Past Through Tomorrow (66 page)

“Good evening, John Lyle.”

I almost jumped out of my boots. Standing in the darkness just inside the archway was Sister Judith. I managed to splutter, “Good evening, Sister Judith,” as she moved toward me.

“Sssh!” she cautioned me. “Someone might hear us. John… John Lyle—it finally happened. My lot was drawn!”

I said, “Huh?” then added lamely, “Felicitations, Elder Sister. May God make his face to shine on your holy service.”

“Yes, yes, thanks,” she answered quickly, “but John… I had intended to steal a few moments to chat with you. Now I can’t—I must be at the robing room for indoctrination and prayer almost at once. I must run.”

“You’d better hurry,” I agreed. I was disappointed that she could not stay, happy for her that she was honored, and exultant that she had not forgotten me. “God go with you.”

“But I just had to tell you that I had been chosen.” Her eyes were shining with what I took to be holy joy; her next words startled me. “I’m scared, John Lyle.”

“Eh? Frightened?” I suddenly recalled how I had felt, how my voice had cracked, the first time I ever drilled a platoon. “Do not be. You will be sustained.”

“Oh, I hope so! Pray for me, John.” And she was gone, lost in the dark corridor.

I did pray for her and I tried to imagine where she was, what she was doing. But since I knew as little about what went on inside the Prophet’s private chambers as a cow knows about courts-martial, I soon gave it up and simply thought about Judith. Later, an hour or more, my revery was broken by a high scream inside the Palace, followed by a commotion, and running footsteps. I dashed down the inner corridor and found a knot of women gathered around the portal to the Prophet’s apartments. Two or three others were carrying someone out the portal; they stopped when they reached the corridor and eased their burden to the floor.

“What’s the trouble?” I demanded and drew my side arm clear.

An elderly Sister stepped in front of me. “It is nothing. Return to your post, legate.”

“I heard a scream.”

“No business of yours. One of the Sisters fainted when the Holy One required service of her.”

“Who was it?”

“You are rather nosy, little brother.” She shrugged. “Sister Judith, if it matters.”

I did not stop to think but snapped, “Let me help her!” and started forward. She barred my way.

“Are you out of your mind? Her sisters will return her to her cell. Since when do the Angels minister to nervous Virgins?”

I could easily have pushed her aside with one finger, but she was right. I backed down and went unwillingly back to my post.

For the next few days I could not get Sister Judith out of my mind. Off watch, I prowled the parts of the Palace I was free to visit, hoping to catch sight of her. She might be ill, or she might be confined to her cell for what must certainly have been a major breach of discipline. But I never saw her.

My roommate, Zebadiah Jones, noticed my moodiness and tried to rouse me out of it. Zeb was three classes senior to me and I had been one of his plebes at the Point; now he was my closest friend and my only confidant. “Johnnie old son, you look like a corpse at your own wake. What’s eating on you?”

“Huh? Nothing at all. Touch of indigestion, maybe.”

“So? Come on, let’s go for a walk. The air will do you good.”

I let him herd me outside. He said nothing but banalities until we were on the broad terrace surrounding the south turret and free of the danger of eye and ear devices. When we were well away from anyone else he said softly, “Come on. Spill it.”

“Shucks, Zeb, I can’t burden anybody else with it.”

“Why not? What’s a friend for?”

“Uh, you’d be shocked.”

“I doubt it. The last time I was shocked was when I drew four of a kind to an ace kicker. It restored my faith in miracles and I’ve been relatively immune ever since. Come on—we’ll call this—a privileged communication—elder adviser and all that sort of rot.”

I let him persuade me. To my surprise Zeb was not shocked to find that I let myself become interested in a holy deaconess. So I told him the whole story and added to it my doubts and troubles, the misgivings that had been growing in me since the day I reported for duty at New Jerusalem.

He nodded casually. “I can see how it would affect you that way, knowing you. See here, you haven’t admitted any of this at confession, have you?”

“No,” I admitted with embarrassment.

“Then don’t. Nurse your own fox. Major Bagby is broad-minded, you wouldn’t shock him—but he might find it necessary to pass it on to his superiors. You wouldn’t want to face Inquisition even if you were alabaster innocent. In fact, especially since you are innocent—and you
are
, you know; everybody has impious thoughts at times. But the Inquisitor expects to find sin; if he doesn’t find it, he keeps on digging.”

At the suggestion that I might be put to the Question my stomach almost turned over. I tried not to show it for Zeb went on calmly, “Johnnie my lad, I admire your piety and your innocence, but I don’t envy it. Sometimes too much piety is more of a handicap than too little. You find yourself shocked at the idea that it takes politics as well as psalm singing to run a big country. Now take me; I noticed the same things when I was new here, but I hadn’t expected anything different and wasn’t shocked.”

“But—” I shut up. His remarks sounded painfully like heresy; I changed the subject. “Zeb, what do you suppose it could have been that upset Judith so and caused her to faint the night she served the Prophet?”

“Eh? How should I know?” He glanced at me and looked away.

“Well, I just thought you might. You generally have all the gossip around the Palace.”

“Well…oh, forget it, old son. It’s really not important.”

“Then you
do
know?”

“I didn’t say that. Maybe I could make a close guess, but you don’t want guesses. So forget it.”

I stopped strolling, stepped in front of him and faced him. “Zeb, anything you know about it—or can guess—I want to hear. It’s important to me.”

“Easy now! You were afraid of shocking me; it could be that I don’t want to shock you.”

“What do you mean? Tell me!”

“Easy, I said. We’re out strolling, remember, without a care in the world, talking about our butterfly collections and wondering if we’ll have stewed beef again for dinner tonight.”

Still fuming, I let him take me along with him. He went on more quietly, “John, you obviously aren’t the type to learn things just by keeping your ear to the ground—and you’ve not yet studied any of the Inner Mysteries, now have you?”

“You know I haven’t. The psych classification officer hasn’t cleared me for the course. I don’t know why.”

“I should have let you read some of the installments while I was boning it. No, that was before you graduated. Too bad, for they explain things in much more delicate language than I know how to use—and justify every bit of it thoroughly, if you care for the dialectics of religious theory. John, what is your notion of the duties of the Virgins?”

“Why, they wait on him, and cook his food, and so forth.”

“They surely do. And so forth. This Sister Judith—an innocent little country girl the way you describe her. Pretty devout, do you think?”

I answered somewhat stiffly that her devoutness had first attracted me to her. Perhaps I believed it.

“Well, it could be that she simply became shocked at overhearing a rather worldly and cynical discussion between the Holy One and, oh, say the High Bursar—taxes and tithes and the best way to squeeze them out of the peasants. It might be something like that, although the scribe for such a conference would hardly be a grass-green Virgin on her first service. No, it was almost certainly the ‘And so forth.’”

“Huh? I don’t follow you.”

Zeb sighed. “You really are one of God’s innocents, aren’t you? Holy Name, I thought you knew and were just too stubbornly straight-laced to admit it. Why, even the Angels carry on with the Virgins at times, after the Prophet is through with them. Not to mention the priests and the deacons. I remember a time when—” He broke off suddenly, catching sight of my face. “Wipe that look off your face! Do you want somebody to notice us?”

I tried to do so, with terrible thoughts jangling around inside my head. Zeb went on quietly, “It’s my guess, if it matters that much to you, that your friend Judith still merits the title ‘Virgin’ in the purely physical sense as well as the spiritual. She might even stay that way, if the Holy One is as angry with her as he probably was. She is probably as dense as you are and failed to understand the symbolic explanations given her—then blew her top when it came to the point where she couldn’t fail to understand, so he kicked her out. Small wonder!”

I stopped again, muttering to myself biblical expressions I hardly thought I knew. Zeb stopped, too, and stood looking at me with a smile of cynical tolerance. “Zeb,” I said, almost pleading with him, “these are terrible things. Terrible! Don’t tell me that you approve?”

“Approve? Man, it’s all part of the Plan. I’m sorry you haven’t been cleared for higher study. See here, I’ll give you a rough briefing. God wastes not. Right?”

“That’s sound doctrine.”

“God requires nothing of man beyond his strength. Right?”

“Yes, but—”

“Shut up. God commands man to be fruitful. The Prophet Incarnate, being especially holy, is required to be especially fruitful. That’s the gist of it; you can pick up the fine points when you study it. In the meantime, if the Prophet can humble himself to the flesh in order to do his plain duty, who are you to raise a ruction? Answer me that.”

I could not answer, of course, and we continued our walk in silence. I had to admit the logic of what he had said and that the conclusions were built up from the revealed doctrines. The trouble was that I wanted to eject the conclusions, throw them up as if they had been something poisonous I had swallowed.

Presently I was consoling myself with the thought that Zeb felt sure that Judith had not been harmed. I began to feel better, telling myself that Zeb was right, that it was not my place, most decidedly not my place, to sit in moral judgment on the Holy Prophet Incarnate.

My mind was just getting around to worrying the thought that my relief over Judith arose solely from the fact that I had looked on her sinfully, that there could not possibly be one rule for one holy deaconess, another rule for all the rest, and I was beginning to be unhappy again—when Zeb stopped suddenly. “What was that?”

We hurried to the parapet of the terrace and looked down the wall. The south wall lies close to the city proper. A crowd of fifty or sixty people was charging up the slope that led to the Palace walls. Ahead of them, running with head averted, was a man dressed in a long gabardine. He was headed for the Sanctuary gate.

Zebadiah looked down and answered himself. “That’s what the racket is—some of the rabble stoning a pariah. He probably was careless enough to be caught outside the ghetto after five.” He stared down and shook his head. “I don’t think he is going to make it.”

Zeb’s prediction was realized at once; a large rock caught the man between the shoulder blades, he stumbled and went down. They were on him at once. He struggled to his knees, was struck by a dozen stones, went down in a heap. He gave a broken high-pitched wail, then drew a fold of the gabardine across his dark eyes and strong Roman nose.

A moment later there was nothing to be seen but a pile of rocks and a protruding slippered foot. It jerked and was still.

I turned away, nauseated. Zebadiah caught my expression.

“Why,” I said defensively, “do these pariahs persist in their heresy? They seem such harmless fellows otherwise.”

He cocked a brow at me. “Perhaps it’s not heresy to them. Didn’t you see that fellow resign himself to his God?”

“But that is not the true God.”

“He must have thought otherwise.”

“But they all know better; we’ve told them often enough.”

He smiled in so irritating a fashion that I blurted out, “I don’t understand you, Zeb—blessed if I do! Ten minutes ago you were instructing me in correct doctrine; now you seem to be defending heresy. Reconcile that.”

He shrugged. “Oh, I can play the Devil’s advocate. I made the debate team at the Point, remember? I’ll be a famous theologian someday—if the Grand Inquisitor doesn’t get me first.”

“Well… Look—you
do
think it’s right to stone the ungodly? Don’t you?”

He changed the subject abruptly. “Did you notice who cast the first stone?” I hadn’t and told him so; all I remembered was that it was a man in country clothes, rather than a woman or a child.

“It was Snotty Fassett.” Zeb’s lip curled.

I recalled Fassett too well; he was two classes senior to me and had made my plebe year something I want to forget. “So that’s how it was,” I answered slowly. “Zeb, I don’t think I could stomach intelligence work.”

“Certainly not as an
agent provocateur
,” he agreed. “Still, I suppose the Council needs these incidents occasionally. These rumors about the Cabal and all…”

I caught up this last remark. “Zeb, do you really think there is anything to this Cabal? I can’t believe that there is any organized disloyalty to the Prophet.”

“Well—there has certainly been some trouble out on the West Coast. Oh, forget it; our job is to keep the watch here.”

BUT WE WERE NOT ALLOWED
to forget it; two days later the inner guard was doubled. I did not see how there could be any real danger, as the Palace was as strong a fortress as ever was built, with its lower recesses immune even to fission bombs. Besides that, a person entering the Palace, even from the Temple grounds, would be challenged and identified a dozen times before he reached the Angel on guard outside the Prophet’s own quarters. Nevertheless people in high places were getting jumpy; there must be something to it.

But I was delighted to find that I had been assigned as Zebadiah’s partner. Standing twice as many hours of guard was almost offset by having him to talk with—for me at least. As for poor Zeb, I banged his ear endlessly through the long night watches, talking about Judith and how unhappy I was with the way things were at New Jerusalem. Finally he turned on me.