“Yet you would have worked in the Church structure at the Coronis colony?”
“I suppose so. I hadn’t really thought about it. I belong to the Order of Saint Christopher of Centaurus, which was organized to carry the Reformed Catholic Church to the stars, and I simply accepted it as a worthy cause. I never really thought about it–not serious, hard, deep thought. But out here on my rock pile I’ve had a lot of time to think.” He smiled faintly. “No wonder they used to put criminals to breaking rocks, back on Earth. It keeps your hands busy and gives you all your time for thought.”
Judy said slowly, “So you don’t think behavioral ethics are absolute, then? There’s nothing definite or divinely ordained about them here?”
“How can there be? Judith, you know what I did. If I hadn’t been brought up with the idea that certain things were in themselves, and of their very nature, enough to send me straight to hell, then when I woke up after the Wind, I could have lived with it. I might have been ashamed, or upset, or even sick at my stomach, but I wouldn’t have had the conviction, deep down in my mind, that none of us deserved to live after it. In the seminary there were no shades of right and wrong, just virtue and sin, and nothing in between. The murders didn’t trouble me, in my madness, because I was taught in seminary that lewdness was a mortal sin for which I could go to hell, so how could murder be any worse? You can go to hell only once, and I was already damned. A rational ethic would have told me that whatever those poor crewmen, God rest them, and I, had done during that night of madness, it had harmed only our dignity and our sense of decency, if that mattered. It was miles away, galaxies away, from murder.”
Judy said, “I’m no theologian, Fa–er–Valentine, but can anyone truly commit a mortal sin in a state of complete insanity?”
“Believe me, I’ve been through that one and out the other side. It doesn’t help to know that if I’d been able to run to my own confessor and get his forgiveness for all the things I did in my madness–ugly things by some standards, but essentially harmless I might have been able to keep from killing those poor men. There has to be something wrong with a system that means you can take guilt on and off like an overcoat. As for madness–nothing can come out in madness that wasn’t there already. What I really couldn’t face, I begin to realize, wasn’t just the knowledge that in madness I’d done some forbidden things with other men, it was the knowledge that I’d done them gladly and willingly, that I no longer believed they were very wrong, and that forever after, any time I saw those men, I’d remember the time when our minds were completely open to one another and we knew each other’s minds and bodies and hearts in the most total love and sharing any human beings could know. I knew I could never hide it again, and so I took out my little pocket knife and started trying to hide from myself.” He smiled wryly, a terrible death’s head grin. “Judith, Judith, forgive me, you came to ask me for help, you asked me to hear your confession, and you’ve ended up listening to mine.”
She said very gently, “If you’re right, we’ll all have to be priests to each other, at least as far as listening to each other and giving what help we can.” One phrase he had spoken seized on her, and she repeated it aloud. “Our minds were open to one another… the most total love and sharing any human beings could know. That seems to be what this world has done to us. In different degrees, yes–but to all of us in some way or other. That’s what he said”–and slowly, searching for words, she told him about the alien, their first meeting in the wood, how he had sent for her during the Wind, and the strange things he had told her, without speech.