The Two Worlds (59 page)

"It's an intriguing thought," Hunt agreed. He stubbed his cigarette and looked across at her. "Doesn't it come into this new book that you're talking about?"

"Sure. That's why I'm interested in collecting opinions."

"When we talked back at my place, you said you thought Christ might have been one of them." Hunt paused and frowned. "No, wait a minute. It was the other way around, wasn't it. You said he was on the other side, right?"

"If he was Jevlenese, it was as a rebel working against their cause," Gina replied. "Or he could simply have been an exceptionally enlightened Terran. Either way, he wasn't working with them."

Hunt looked at her with interest as he refilled their cups from the coffeepot on the table. "What makes you say that?"

"Well, think about it. The operation that the Jevlenese set up was aimed at retarding Earth's development by implanting notions of the supernatural and starting mass movements based on irrationality. That's where early religions came from. The Lunarians didn't have anything like that."

"Yes, exactly." Hunt looked puzzled. "But isn't . . ."

Gina shook her head, reading the question. "No. He didn't. What people have been told for the best part of two thousand years is wrong. He didn't teach what the churches say he taught. What they daren't tell their followers is the one thing he
was
trying to say. You see—that's exactly the kind of thing I want to get into."

Hunt stared back curiously. "Go on," he said.

"He told people not to listen to the Pharisees, scribes, priests, or other self-important persons and institutions who were out to control them and exploit them. He taught, simply, that inner integrity and honesty were essential if you want to know yourself and the world. It didn't have anything to do with rituals and dogma, or rules for organizations. It was simply a prescription for a personal code of conduct and ethics aimed at coming to terms with one's nature and with reality. In other words, a philosophy of
individual
self-knowledge and responsibility, totally compatible with the notions of science and reason that were beginning to emerge at the time, despite all the efforts of the Jevlenese. And that, of course, made him dangerous. A threat to their whole operation." She looked pointedly at Hunt. His eyes widened. Gina nodded. "Exactly. So they got rid of him. Then they exterminated his followers, seized control of what he'd started, and rewrote the whole script."

"Giving us the Dark Ages," Hunt said, seeing the point.

"Right. Which stopped everything dead and put their program back on track. The medieval Church with its Inquisition, holy wars, land grabbing, and its involvements in European power politics had nothing to do with anything Christ taught. It was trying to stave off the Renaissance, which the Jevlenese could see coming.
Real
Christianity had been dead for centuries."

It fitted with the things Gina had said at his apartment on how things might have gone otherwise, Hunt recalled. She had done more work on it than he had realized. If a lot of powerful institutions had roots in those kinds of murky waters, he could understand why nobody was doing very much talking. At the same time, it was dawning on him just how devastating the book that she was proposing could be. Caldwell would have seen it, too. Small wonder, then, that Caldwell had declined to involve UNSA officially. The wonder was that Caldwell had been willing to have anything to do with her at all.

"Except, maybe, in one place," Gina said, making it sound like an afterthought.

"Uh?" Hunt returned abruptly from his thoughts.

"If my reading of history is right, there was one place where Christianity might have hung on long after it was stamped out across the rest of Europe," Gina said.

"Where?"

"Ireland."

Hunt's eyebrows lifted in surprise. "Begorrah!" he exclaimed.

Gina went on. "Even the Irish aren't told the true story. They're taught that Saint Patrick converted the island in the fifth century, and they've remained staunchly faithful ever since."

"That's what I always thought, too," Hunt said. "Not that it's a subject that I've ever had much reason to get involved in, especially."

"They didn't ally with the
Roman
Church until the sixteenth century—more than a thousand years later; and that was only as a gesture of defiance against the English after Henry VIII broke away. Roman Catholicism became a symbol of Irish nationalism. What Saint Patrick brought was Christianity."

"You mean the original?"

"Something a lot closer to it, anyhow. And it flourished because it fitted with the ways of the native culture. It spread from there through Scotland and England into northern Europe. But then it collided with the institutionalized Jevlenese counterfeit being pushed northward, and it was destroyed. The first
papal
mission didn't reach England until a hundred sixty-five years after Patrick died."

"How do you know all this?"

"My mother's side of the family comes from Wexford. I go there for vacations and lived there for a while once."

"When did Patrick die?" Hunt asked, realizing that he really had no idea.

"In the fifth century. He was probably born in Wales and carried across by pirates."

"So we're talking about a long time before that, then."

"Oh yes. In terms of literature and learning, they were unsurpassed anywhere in Western Europe long before Caesar crossed the Channel."

"Let me see, every English schoolboy knows that. Fifty-five B.C., yes?"

"Right. Their race was unique, descended from a mixture of Celts and a pre-Celtic stock from the eastern Mediterranean." Gina stared across the room and smiled to herself. "It wasn't at all the kind of repressive thing that people were conditioned to think of later, you know. It was a very earthy, zestful, life-loving culture."

"In what kind of way?" Hunt asked.

"The way women were treated, for a start. They were completely equal, with full rights of property—unusual in itself, for the times. Sex was considered a healthy and enjoyable part of life, the way it ought to be. Nobody connected it with sinning."

"The real life of Riley, eh?" Hunt commented.

"They had an easygoing attitude to all personal relations. Polygamy was fairly normal. And then, so was polyandry. So you could have a string of wives, but each of them might have several husbands. But if a particular match didn't work out, it was easy to dissolve. You just went to a holy place, stood back-to-back, said the right words, and walked ten paces. So children weren't emotionally crippled by having to grow up with two people hating each other in a self-imposed prison; but if the marriage didn't work out, they weren't traumatized, either, because they had so many other anchor points among this network of people who liked each other."

"It all sounds very civilized to me," Hunt said.

"And that was where early Christianity hung on," Gina said again. "So maybe it gives us an idea of what it really had to say."

Hunt watched the faraway expression on Gina's face for a few seconds, then grinned impudently. "Oh, I can see where you're coming from," he teased. "It's nothing to do with humanist philosophies at all. You just like the thought of having a string of men to pick from."

"Well, why should men have all the fun?" she retorted, refusing to be put on the defensive.

"Ahah! The real Gina emerges."

"I'm merely stating a principle."

"What's wrong with it? Don't women fantasize?"

"Of course they do." She caught the look in his eye and smiled impishly. "And yes, who knows? Maybe one day if you tell me yours, I'll tell you mine."

Hunt laughed and picked up his coffee cup. He finished the contents and allowed the silence to draw a curtain across the subject. "How are we doing for time?" he asked, setting the cup down. "Will any of the others be in the bar yet?"

Gina glanced at her watch. "It's a bit early. What else is there to see of the ship?"

"Oh, I think I've had it with being dragged around for one day. You know, I really do make a lousy tourist."

"That's too bad. I can't wait to see Jevlen. Just imagine, a real, actual, alien planet. And we'll be there tomorrow. I still haven't really gotten over all this."

Hunt looked at her thoughtfully. "Maybe we don't have to keep you waiting that long," he said.

Gina looked puzzled. "Why? What are you talking about?"

"What you just said has given me an idea . . . visar, are there any couplers nearby?"

"A bank of them, to the right outside the door you came in through," visar replied.

"Are there two free right now?"

"What are you doing?" Gina murmured.

"Wait, and you'll see."

"Plenty," visar replied.

Hunt stood up. "Come on," he said to Gina. "You haven't seen half of Ganymean communications yet. This'll be the fastest interstellar trip you ever dreamed of. I guarantee it."

The room was just a cubicle, its main furnishing being a kind of recliner, padded in red, with several panels of what looked like a multicolored crystalline material above and on either side of a concave support where the occupant's head would be. The wall behind carried equipment and fittings of unfamiliar construction.

Gina ran her eye over the interior. "I take it this is how you connect into the Thurien virtual-travel net," she guessed.

"That's right," Hunt said. He tapped the communicator disk attached behind his ear. "This gadget that they gave you when you came aboard is just a two-way audiovisual link to visar—a viphone that goes straight into your head instead of through screens and senses. But this is the full works."

"What they call total neural stimulation?"

"Instead of you having to go take your senses to wherever the information is, this brings the information to your senses—provided that the place you want to `go' is wired with sensors for the system. It wouldn't work too well for Times Square or the middle of the Gobi. Also, it intercepts the motor and speech outputs from your brain, and generates the feedback that you'd experience from moving around and interacting there."

Gina nodded but still looked unsure. After a few seconds, she said, "And all of that two-way information transfer takes place instantly through the same—what do you call it, `dimension'?"

"H-space."

"That's it . . . that this ship goes through to get to Jevlen, right?"

"Yes."

"Okay . . . But the ship has to spend a whole day getting out past Pluto before it can use h-space. How come this coupler can do it from right here? Or how come you can do it from Goddard, for that matter?"

Hunt was already nodding. "A port big enough to take a ship would mess up everybody's astronomical tables if you projected it into a planetary system. So instant planet-to-planet hopping is out. But for communications it's a different matter. You can send information on a gamma-frequency laser into a microtoroid that can be generated on planetary surfaces—or in ships like this one—without undesirable side effects. The Thuriens use it for most of their routine business and social calling—and you don't have to worry about drinking the water or catching any foreign bugs. It's got a lot of advantages."

Gina moved forward and touched the material of the recliner curiously. It was soft and yielding. Hunt watched from inside the doorway. "So what do I do?" she asked.

"Just take a seat. visar will handle the rest."

Gina hesitated for a moment, feeling just a trifle self-conscious. Then she lowered herself into the recliner, settled her feet on the rest, and let herself sink back. A warm, drowsy feeling swept over her, causing her head to drop back automatically onto the concave support, which was also padded. She felt more relaxed than she could ever remember. The interior of the cubicle seemed to be floating distantly in a detached kind of way. A part of her mind was aware that she had been thinking coherently only moments before, and that someone else had been there for some reason, but she was unable to recall who or why, or really to care. Nothing really mattered.

"Like it?" She recognized the voice as visar's.

"It's great. What do I do—just lie back and enjoy it?"

"First, we'll need to register some more of your personal cerebral patterns," visar said. "It only takes a few seconds." When Gina had first tried the communicator disk, she had experienced a strange series of sensations and illusions in her hearing and vision. visar had explained that the range and activity levels in the sensory parts of the brain varied from individual to individual, and it was necessary to tune the system to give the right responses. Once established, the parameters were stored away for future reference, making the process a onetime thing, analogous to fingerprinting. Presumably visar now needed to extend its records to accommodate the other sensory centers, too.

Gina found herself becoming acutely conscious of the pressure of the recliner against her body, the touch of her clothes, and even the feeling of air flowing through her nostrils as she breathed. She could feel her own pulses all over, and then a weird tingling unrolling down her spine. visar was experimenting with her sense of touch, exercising her nervous system through its range of responses and reading the neural activity.

She felt herself convulsing in spasms—and then realized that she wasn't moving at all; the sensation was due to rapid variations of sensitivity occurring all over her skin. She felt hot, then cold, then itchy, then prickly, and finally numb. Sweet, sour, bitter, then again sweet tastes came and went in her mouth; her nose experienced a succession of odors . . . And all of a sudden, she was wide awake and alert again, and everything was normal.

"That's it," visar informed her. "How would you like me for your dentist?"

Gina was too intrigued by what was going on to reply, but as she waited, her brow creased in puzzlement. It didn't seem as if anything much
was
going on.

She sat up and found Hunt still standing in the doorway, leaning one shoulder against the side, arms folded, watching her curiously with an odd smile twisting his mouth.