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 to 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!’