The Dark Design by Phillip Jose Farmer

“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 running several times to get him a drink from a bowl filled with nonalcoholic bloom juice. He also gestured for her to light his cigar. She obeyed quickly and then resumed her position behind him.

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, cannibal, swine eater uncirmcumcised dog of an infidel, all God’s children, were here, all were chose.”

“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.”

“What are you talking about?” she said. “You sound as weird as those Chancers.”

“We shall see-if you care to see,” he said. He excused himself and walked to the big table, where he started talking to a man who had just entered.

Jill sauntered toward Jeanne Jugan, intending to ask her what she meant by calling herself Piscator’s disciple. De Bergerac, however, placed himself in front of her. He was smiling broadly now.

“Ah, Ms. Gulbirra! I must beg your pardon for that unfortunate incident again! It was the liquor which caused me to behave so unforgivably, well not unforgivably I hope, but so barbarically! It is seldom that I drink more than an ounce or two, since I abominate the dulling of my senses. Alcohol makes one a swine, and I do not care for the beast on the hoof, though I adore him sliced and fried in a pan or roasted on a spit. But that night we were fishing . . .”