“You know what I think,” she said to Chad. “I think that historian, Glumshalak, purposely changed the Fresco in his Compendium, diametrically changed it. And he forbid the Pistach to clean the Fresco so they’d never know.”
“Why would he have done that?”
“Do you ever go to church, Chad?”
“Not often. My parents were Methodists, at least at Christmas and Easter. Merilu was reared Episcopalian, but that was more a social thing with her parents than it was religious.”
“My mother was Catholic for weddings and burials and funerals. At other times she was a pagan I guess. She believed in spirits of the trees and mountains and rivers, not that they would do anything for her, rather that she should be protective of them. Her father was a history professor, in Mexico. He wrote several books about the bloody gods of Mexico, and she read them all. When I was a kid, Mami told me the Mexican gods weren’t the only bloody ones, and we should never serve gods that had been invented to take the blame for everything bloody, painful, primitive and unenlightened that people wanted to do.Why did we Israelites kill every man, woman, child and beast in that city? Why, the Lord Jehovah commanded it. Why do we Spaniards steal food from these Indian people, and mutilate them, and use them as slaves? Why, we do it so they will love Christ! Why do we Aztecs torture and sacrifice people? Huitzilopotchli demands it!
“Whether it was the Israelites invading Canaan or the Spanish invading the Southwest, or one Mexican tribe warring against another, the answer was always the same.We enslave and torture and mutilate and kill in the name of our god.
“My grandfather said people who can learn, learn morality the way they learn everything else, by building on history. He also said that some people cannot learn from history, so they cannot change. For them, there’s only one book or tradition or whatever it’s called in their religion, and in that book God is eternal and whatever the book says God commanded two or three or four thousand years ago, God still commands today. That may be kill homosexuals or kill nonbelievers. It may say enslave your enemies. It may say mutilate or sequester women, or sell your ten-year-old daughter for somebody’s third wife.
“But suppose back in A.D. two or three hundred, we had had a Glumshalak, and he had blanked out all the Old Testament. Suppose he had written a commentary that purported to tell us what was in the book, but the book itself was eliminated. Suppose the commentary was devoted to tolerance and persuasion, suppose it forbade violence. We wouldn’t have a god who kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden for intellectual curiosity, or the destruction of the whole world by flood, or the slaughtering of innocents right and left. The commentary would tell us about a God who triumphed through peace and paying attention to history instead of bloodshed and horror.”
“You think we’d have sweetness and light?” asked Chad.
“Maybe, if there was no bloody scripture for the evangelists to quote.”
“It would make a big dent in self-righteousness, but it wouldn’t change human nature.”
“It might not change human nature, but it would eliminate a whole set of alibis. I think that’s what Glumshalak did. He didn’t want his people to be bound by the cruelty and violence in their history. He wanted his people tobelieve they were good. So he destroyed all the records that said what was really there . . .”
“How do you know?”
“He had to have done, otherwise they’d have turned up before now. He certainly didn’t repaint the Fresco, he didn’t have the talent. That’s obvious. He forbade anybody cleaning the Fresco, and he wrote down what he thought should have been there. I think Glumshalak’s commentary made the Pistach the people they are. A good people. Not perfect, but good, because they’ve been selecting toward goodness for generations and generations. When the president told me not to let anything interfere with their coming back and finishing the job, he was saying that they’re a good people.”
“You think the Pistach won’t go back to Earth?”