The Dark Design

The doorways to the neighboring rooms were filled with dangling strings of white and red hornfish vertebrae; these emitted a tinkling when disturbed. Mats of woven fibers from irontree vines hung on the walls, and transparent intestines of Riverdragons, stretched on bamboo frames, were above each window.

All in all, though there were some things, such as the acetylene lamps, not found elsewhere, the room was a variation of what many called Riparian Culture; others, Riverine Polynesian.

The lamp lights strove to pierce the heavy clouds of tobacco and marijuana. A band played softly on a small podium in a corner. It was providing its services in return for booze and a chance to please itself with useful work. The musicians were beating or brushing drums, blowing on a bamboo flute, a clay ocarina; stroking a harp made of a turtlefish shell and fish guts; sawing on a fiddle of fish intestines and English-yewlike wood with a yew bow fitted with the horsehairlike mouth cilia of the blue dolphin; hammering a xy­lophone; blowing a saxophone, a trumpet.

The music was unrecognizable, at least for Jill. But she thought that it was derived from a Central or South American Indian piece.

"If this were tete-a-tete, instead of a large party, I would be able to give you tea, my dear," Piscator said. "But it is not possible. My grail does not provide me with tea daily, but only one small bagful once a week."

He had not changed so much that he did not miss the ceremony of tea, so beloved by all Japanese. Jill regretted the scarcity of the herb, too. Like most of her nation, she felt that something vital was missing if she didn't get, her tea at the proper time.

Piscator dipped a glass in a huge glass bowl full of skull-bloom and handed it to her. She sipped on it while he told her how happy he was to see her here. He sounded as if he really meant it. She found herself warming to him, though she did remind herself that he came from a culture which conditioned males to regard females as plea­sure and work objects. Then she warned herself-for the ten thousandth time?-that she must not be as guilty of prejudice as others. Find the facts first and study them before judgment.

Her host led her around, introducing her briefly. Firebrass waved at her from a corner. Cyrano smiled thinly and bowed. They had encountered each other a number of times since that morning, but each had been aloof though polite. She did not want it that way. After all, he had apologized, and she was very curious about this flamboyant seventeenth-centurian.

She said hello to Ezekiel Hardy and David Schwartz, whom she saw every day in the office inside the hangar and in the factories nearby. Hardy and Schwartz were friendly enough; they had learned by now that she was thoroughly knowledgeable in her field. In many, in fact. She had bridled her impatience and anger at their ignorance and their assumed superiority. It had paid off, though she did not know how long she could repress herself.

"Don't bottle up," she told herself. "Empty yourself."

How many times had she done that, or tried to do that? And it had seemed to work so many times, though not always by any means. Yet, here was this Japanese, Ohara, calling himself by the goofy name of Piscator-how weird-telling her than Zen was nonsense. Well, not exactly nonsense. But he had certainly indicated that it was overrated. She had not liked to hear that. It struck her below the belt of her self-image; it injured her. Which it should not have done. She should have laughed at him, even if only inwardly. But he had seemed so sure.

14

One of the women she was introduced to was Jea

Piscator mentioned that she had once been a servant in her native France but then had become one of the founders of the Roman Catholic religious order of the Little Sisters of the Poor, established in 1839 in Brittany.

"I am his disciple," Jugan said, nodding at Piscator.

Jill's eyebrows rose. "Oh!" She had no chance to continue the conversation. Piscator steered her away with a light touch on the elbow.

"You may talk to her later."

Jill wondered what particular religion, sect, or mental discipline Piscator belonged to. He wasn't a member of the Church of the Second Chance. A Chancer always wore a hornfish spiral vertebra or its wooden facsimile on a string from his neck.

However, the next person she met did wear that emblem, three, in fact, indicating that he was a bishop. Samuelo, short, very dark, and hawk faced, had been born sometime around the middle of the second century A.D. He had been a rabbi of the Jewish community at Nehardea in Babylonia. According to Piscator, he was somewhat famous in his time for his knowledge of traditional law and for some attainments in science. One of his feats was the compilation of a calendar of the Hebrew year. His chief claim to fame, however, lay in his efforts to adjust the Jewish law to the law of the land in which the Jews of the Diaspora lived.

"His principle was The law of the state is the binding law," Piscator said.

Samuelo introduced his wife, Rahelo. She was even shorter, though not as dark, and she had very broad hips and heavy legs, but a face of startling sensuality. Replying to Jill's questions, she said that she had been born in the Krakow ghetto in the fourteenth century a.d. Piscator would tell Jill later that Rahelo had been abducted by a Polish nobleman and imprisoned for a year in his castle. Tiring of her, he had then kicked her out, though not without a fat purse of gold coins. Her husband had murdered her because she had not had the grace to kill herself because of her dishonor.

Samuelo sent Rahelo ru

Jill felt like kicking Rahelo for putting up with her ancient degradation and Sanmuelo for his ancient complacency. She could visualize him at prayers, thanking God that he was not born a woman.

Later, Piscator said to feet, "You were furious with the bishop and his wife."

She did not ask him he he knew. she said, ''It must have been a hell of a shock for him to wake up here and find out that he was not one of God's chosen people. That everybody, idol worshipper, ca

"We were all shocked," Piscater said. "And terrified. Weren't,

you?"

She stared at turn for a moment, then laughed, and said, "Of course. I was an atheist, and still am. I was sure that I was just so much flesh that would become so much dust. And that was that. I was horribly frightened when I awoke here. But at that same time, well, not at first but a little later, I was relieved. So, I thought, there is eternal life; Then, even later, I saw such strange things, and we were in such a strange place, nothing like heaven or hell, you know ..."

"I know,'' he said. He smiled. "I wonder what Samuelo thought when he saw that the uncircumcised goyim of Earth had been resurrected without their foreskins? That must have been as puz­zling as the fact that men could no longer grow beards. On the one hand, God had performed a briss upon all the Gentiles who needed it and so He must be a Jewish god. On the other band, a man could no longer sport the full beard demanded by God, so He surely could not be a Jewish god.

"It was, and is, such things that should have and should be changing our patterns of thinking," Piscator said.

He came close, looking up at her with dark brown eyes set in fleshy slits. "The Second Chancers have some excellent ideas about why we have been raised from the dead and who has done it. They are not too far wrong about the way, or ways, one must take to attain the goal. A goal which mankind should desire and the gate to which our unknown benefactors have opened for us. But exactness is tightness. The inexact Church has wandered off the main road, or, I should say, the only road. Which is not to say that there is not more than one road."