“Hallelujah, sister!” Burton said. He was always willing to throw himself into the form of a religion while laughing at its spirit.
“It’s a long long trip yet, brother. My back hurts from paddling my canoe against the current, and I hear that it’s foggy and cold most of the way from now on and not a living soul to be seen. It’ll be very lonely there. That’s why I’d like to go with you and your friends.”
Burton thought, Why not?
“There’s room for just one more,” he said. “However, we don’t take pacifists since we may have to fight. We don’t want any deadweight.”
“Don’t you worry about me, brother. I can fight like an avenging angel of the Lord for you, if you’re on the side of good.”
She put her few possessions on the boat a few minutes later. Tom Turpin, the black piano player, was happy to see her at first. Then he found out she’d taken a vow of chastity.
“She’s crazy, Captain,” he told Burton. “Why’d you take her on? She’s got that good-looking body and she’ll drive me crazy her not letting me touch her.”
“Perhaps she’ll talk you into taking the vow, too,” Burton said, and he laughed.
Turpin didn’t think that was funny.
When the boat pulled out after a four-day, not a two-day, leave as planned, Blessed sang a hymn, then she shouted, “You needed me, brother Burton, to complete your number. You were only eleven and now you’re twelve! Twelve’s a good, a holy number. The apostles of Jesus were twelve!”
“Yaas,” Burton said softly. “And one of them was Judas.”
He looked at Ah Qaaq, the ancient Mayan warrior, a pocket-sized Hercules gone to pot. He seldom offered to start a conversation, though he would talk fluently if he was cornered. Nor did he draw back if someone touched him. According to Joe Miller, X, when visiting Clemens, had not wanted to be touched, had, in fact, acted as if Clemens were some sort of leper. Clemens had thought that X, though soliciting the help of the Valleydwellers, felt that he was morally superior and that if one touched him he was somehow fouled.
Neither Ah Qaaq nor Gilgamesh acted as if they must keep others at a proper distance. In fact, the Sumerian insisted on being very close when conversing, almost nose to nose. And he touched the other speaker frequently as if he had to have flesh contact also.
That insistence on closeness could be overcompensation, though. The Ethical might have found out that his recruits had noted his dislike for near proximity and was forcing himself to get close.
Long ago, the agent, Spruce, had said that he and his colleagues loathed violence, that doing it made them feel degraded. But if that were so, they had certainly learned to be violent without showing any repulsion. The agents on both boats had fought as well as the others. And X, as Odysseus and Barry Thorn, had killed enough to satisfy Jack the Ripper.
Possibly, X’s avoidance of touch had nothing to do with a personal feeling. It might be that a touch by another human being could leave some sort of psychic print. Perhaps psychic wasn’t the right word. The wathans, the auras that all sentient beings radiated, according to X, might take a sort of fingerprint. And this might last for some time. If so, then X would not be able to return to the tower until the “print” had vanished. His colleagues would see it and wonder how he’d gotten it.
Was that speculation too bizarre? All X had to tell his questioners was that he’d been on a mission and had been touched by a Valleydweller.
Ah! But what if X was not supposed to have been in The Valley? What if he had an alibi for his absences but it didn’t include a visit to The Valley? Then he could not explain satisfactorily why his wathan bore a stranger’s print.
This speculation, though, required that an agent’s or Ethical’s prints be different from those of resurrectees and instantly recognizable as such.
Burton shook his head. Sometimes, he got almost dizzy •trying to think through these mysteries.
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