The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

“Then you know all about the ka and the akh and the other stuff. This person said that the Chancer’s theology was partly true. Mainly because one of the Ethicals had visited the man called La Viro and had thus caused him to found the Church.”

“I thought that was just one of the wild tales those vision­aries had invented,” Jill said. “I didn’t put any more credence in it than I did in the ravings of Earth prophets. Moses, Jesus, Zoroaster, Mohammed, Buddha, Smith, Eddy, the whole sick crew.”

“No more did I,” Cyrano said. “Though, when I was dying, I did repent. But that was to make my poor unhappy sister and my friend Le Bret happy. Besides, it couldn’t hurt if I made a deathbed conversion. And, to tell the truth, I was scared of hellfire. After all . . .”

“Your childhood conditioning.”

“Exactly. But here was a being who said that there was such a thing as a soul. And I had proof positive that there could be a life after death. Still, I could not help wondering if I was the butt of a joke. What if this man were just one of my neighbors, pretending to be a visitor from the gods, as it were? I would believe him, and then tomorrow I would be laughed at. What? De Bergerac, the rational­ist, the atheist, to be taken in so completely by this fantastic tale?

“But. . . who would do this to me? I knew no one who would have the motive or the means for such a joke. And what about the drug which made Livy sleep and which paralyzed my legs? I had never heard of such a drug. Also, where would a practical joker get that sphere which enclosed his head? There was just enough light to see that it was black and opaque. Still . . .

“And then, as if he perceived my lack of belief, he handed me a lens of some material. ‘Put this in front of your eye,’ he said. ‘Look at Livy.’

“I did so, and I gasped with astonishment. Just beyond the top of her head was a globe of many colors. It shone brightly, as if illuminated by itself. It spun and swelled and expanded and put out arms from time to time, six-sided tentacles, and these shrank back into the globe arid then other arms came out.

“The being then reached out and told me to drop the lens into his hand. He did not say so, but it was evident that he did not want me to touch him. I obeyed, of course.

“The lens went back into his cloak, and he said, ‘What you saw is the wathan. That is the immortal part of you.’

“Then he said, ‘I have chosen a few of you to help me fight against this monstrous evil my people are committing. I picked you because of your wathans. You see, we can read wathans as easily as you can read a children’s book. A person’s character is reflected in his wathan. Perhaps I shouldn’t say reflected, since the wathan is the character. But I don’t have the time to explain that. The point is, only a minute fraction of humanity will reach the final, the desired ultimate stage, of wathanhood, unless humanity is given much more time.’

“He then went on to sketch what the Chancers expound in such detail. That the unfulfilled wathan of a dead person wanders through space forever, containing all that is human but uncon­scious. Only the complete evolved wathan has consciousness. And this stage is attained only by those who achieve an ethical perfection while alive. Or near perfection, anyway.

” ‘What?’ I said. “The ultimate in attaining ethical perfection is to wander like a ghost through space, to bounce off the walls of the universe like a cosmic handball, back and forth, yet be conscious of this horrible state and unable to communicate with anyone but one’s self? That is a desirable state?’

‘ “You must not interrupt,’ the stranger said. ‘But I will tell you this. The being who attains perfect wathanhood or akhhood, goes beyond. He does not stay in this world. He goes beyond!’