Night of Light

Mother Kri, short, fat, large-bosomed, smiled at them. Her blue teeth looked black in the duskiness.

“Welcome, gentlemen. You are just in time for the Last Supper.”

“The Last Supper,” Carmody called on his way to the washroom. “Hah? I’ll be my namesake, good old John. But who plays Judas?”

He heard Father Skelder snort with indignation and Father Ralloux’s booming, “There’s a little Judas in all of us.”

Carmody could not resist stopping and saying, “Are you pregnant, too, dearie?” and then he walked away, laughing uproariously to himself. When he came back and sat down at the table, Carmody submitted with a smile to Skelder’s saying grace and Mother Kri’s asking for a blessing. It was easier to sit silent for a moment than to make trouble by insisting on the food being passed at once.

“When in Rome...” he said to Skelder and smiled to himself at the monk’s puzzlement. “Pass the salt, please,” he continued, “but don’t spill it.”

Then he burst into a roar of laughter as Skelder did exactly that. “Judas come back to life!”

The monk’s face flushed, and he scowled. “With your attitude, Mr. Carmody, I doubt very much if you’ll get through the Chance.”

“Worry about yourself,” said Carmody. “As for me, I intend to find some goodlooking female and concentrate so much on her I’ll not notice until long after that the seven days are up. You ought to try it, Prior.”

Skelder tightened his lips. His long thin face was built for showing disapproval; the many deep lines in forehead and cheeks, the bony angles of cheek and jaw, the downward slant of the long meaty nose, the pattern of straight lines and whorls, these made up the blueprint of the stem judge, showed the fingerprints of a Maker who had squeezed out of this putty flesh an image of the righteous, then set the putty in a freezing blast to harden into stone.

The stone just now showed signs of being human, for it was distended and crimsoned with hot blood flooding beneath the skin. The pale blue-gray eyes glared from beneath pale gold eyebrows.

Father Ralloux’s gentle voice fell like a benediction upon the room.

“Anger is not exactly one of the virtues.”

He was a strange-looking man, this priest with his face made up of such contradictory features, the big pitcher-handle ears, red hair, pug nose, and broad smiling lips of the cartoon Irishman, all repudiated by the large dark eyes with their long feminine lashes. His shoulders were broad and his neck was thickly muscled, but his powerful arms ended in delicate and beautiful woman’s hands. The soft liquid eyes looked gravely and honestly at you, yet you got the impression that there was something troubled in them.

Carmody had wondered why the fellow was Skelder’s partner, for he was not at all well known, as the older man was. But he had learned that Ralloux had a fine reputation in anthropological circles. In fact, he was placed on a higher plane than his superior, but Skelder was in charge of the expedition because of his prominence in other fields. The lean monk was head of the conservative faction in the Church that was trying to reform the current morality of the laity; his taped image and voice had appeared upon every Federation planet that owned a caster; he had thundered forth a denunciation of nudity in the private home and on the public beach, of brief-contract marital relations, of polymorphous-perverse sexual attitudes, of all that had once been forbidden by Western Terrestrial society and especially by the Church but was now tolerated, if not condoned, among the laymen because it was socially acceptable. He wanted to use the Church’s strongest weapons in enforcing a return to former standards; when the liberals and moderates in the Church accused him of being Victorian, he gladly adopted the title, declaring that that age was the one to which he desired they turn back. It was this background that was responsible now for the furious look he was giving Father Ralloux.

“ Our Lord became angry when the occasion demanded! Remember the money- changers and the fig tree!” He pointed a long finger at his companion. “It is a misconception to think of Him as the gentle Jesus! One merely has to take the trouble to read the Gospels to perceive at once that He was a hard man in many respects, that—“

“My God, I’m hungry,” said Carmody loudly, interjecting not only to stop the tirade but because he was famished. It seemed to him he’d never been so empty.

Tand said, “You’ll find you’ll have to eat enormous quantities of food during the next seven days. Your energy will be drained out as fast as it’s put in.”

Mother Kri went out of the room and quickly returned carrying a plate full of cakes “There are seven pieces, gentlemen, each baked in the likeness of one of the Seven Fathers of Yess. These are always baked for certain religious feasts, one of which is the Last Supper before the Sleep. I hope you gentlemen do not mind partaking. A bit from each cake and a sip of wine with each is customary. This communion symbolizes not only that you are partaking of the flesh and blood of Yess but that you are given the power to create your own god, as the Seven did.”

“Ralloux and I ca

Mrs. Kri looked disappointed but brightened when Carmody and Aps, the Vegan, said they would participate. Carmody thought it would be politic in case he wished to use Mrs. Kri later on.

“I do not think,” said the woman, “that you would mind, Father Skelder, if you knew the story of the Seven.”

“I do know,” he said. “I made a study of your religion before I came here. I do not allow myself to remain ignorant on any subject if I can help it. As I understand it, the myth goes that in the begi

“Then, one day, seven men gathered together, seven good men, and Algul, the wicked son, in an effort to frustrate them, put everybody to sleep except seven of his most wicked worshippers. But the good seven fought off the Sleep, had a mystical union, a sort of psychical intercourse with the Mother”—Skelder’s face twisted with distaste—“each of them becoming her lover, and the seven pieces of the son Yess were pulled together, reunited, and became alive. The evil seven turned into all sorts of monsters and the seven good became minor gods, consorts of the Mother. Yess restored the world to its former state. His twin brother was torn into seven pieces, and these were buried at different places over the planet. Since then, good has dominated evil, but there is still much evil left in the world, and the legend goes that if seven absolutely wicked men can gather together during the time of the Sleep, they will be able to resurrect Algul.”

He paused, smiled as if in quiet mockery of this myth, then said, “There are other aspects, but that is the essence. Obviously, a symbolical story of the conflict between good and evil in this universe: many of its features are universal; they may be found in almost every religion of the Galaxy.”