“But, the Fresco does define our belief about ourselves and our worlds. Your Scripture defines men and women as unique children of God and it defines the world as the center of God’s attention. Because of your Scripture, you behave as though that is true, unfortunately from our point of view, for it leads you to destructive, hurtful excesses. Our Fresco defines us as a people who amend other worlds and bring them to peace, but I confess, we are that people only because the Fresco says so.”
Chad said, “I’m a student of languages, and in our world, seminal works of ethics are almost always written. In fact, I know of no culture in which moralities are conveyed by picture, though certainly many histories are memorialized in that way. What is it that makes you so concerned?”
Chiddy came close and confided in them, telling them all about the dropped cleaning rag and the flap that followed. He told them about Glumshalak and the Compendium. He told them how the Chapter had refused to look any deeper at the Fresco itself.
“How far back does the cleaning taboo go?” Chad asked.
“To the time of Glumshalak,” Chiddy said. “It was that athyco who forbade us to fiddle with the Fresco evermore. We have always believed that Glumshalak considered the possibility the Fresco might be changed by some political or tribal faction to gain power for themselves, and so ai forbade it.”
Chad nodded, asked a few more questions, and looked exceeding thoughtful.
“Do you understand what’s going on?” Benita asked him when they were alone.
“You reminded me about the Dead Sea Scrolls. The reason there was such a tizzy was that many religious groups really don’t worship God, they worship the Scriptures. Christians, Jews, they both do it. So do the Moslems. Even though the commandment says ‘You shall have no other God before me,’ the Scripture worshippers put the writings ahead of God. Instead of interpreting God’s actions in nature, for example, they interpret nature in the light of the Scripture. Nature says the rock is billions of years old, but the book says different, so even though men wrote the book, and God make the rock and God gave us minds that have found ways to tell how old it is, we still choose to believe the Scripture.
“The Pistach could be like that. Totally governed by what’s on that wall.”
“That’s a happy thought,” said Benita, finding it anything but. If anything, the discussion amplified the atmosphere of pending danger, one sufficiently disturbing that none of them, except for Carlos, slept really well that night.
In the morning they were given a meal of tea and a fruit that looked like a spherical, faceted eggplant and tasted like nothing they had ever tasted before. Rhubarb, maybe, Benita suggested. Chad thought sweetened asparagus. Carlos merely smiled and ate it without complaint. Even as they climbed the stairs to the House of the Fresco, Carlos had a smile on his face and was humming under his breath. The stairway was wide and gracefully curved, with flowers growing along the edges of the terraces and flat areas where Pistach gathered and sang. Their singing, Benita thought, was like an evening chorus of crickets and night birds and frogs, repetitive and soothing and, after a time, so subliminal as to be totally disregarded. The House at the top of the stairs rose in a lovely domed line, like the breast of a young girl. They went through the center one of three bronze doors.
She had expected dirtiness, dark colors, ominous shadings something akin to the look of the Sistine Chapel murals before they were cleaned, but it was far worse than she had imagined. The room was lofty, well proportioned and clean, but the painted panels were only dark smears, shapes barely discernable through a varnish of soot. Above the Fresco was a narrow circular gallery on which a number of Pistach were gathered. Though she wasn’t sure what old age looked like among the Pistach, she got the immediate impression that these were very old ones. Perhaps it was the way Chiddy and Vess bowed to them and walked with their eyes down beneath the gaze of those above.