CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The others had gone to take care of various chores, leaving Hunt and Gina together at the dinner table. They had all agreed to meet later in the mess area for a nightcap — or two, or maybe several.

Gina stared down at her coffee cup and unconsciously traced a question mark lightly on the tabletop with her finger. “Is it true that some of the animals on Jevlen have an uncanny resemblance to ones found in Earth’s mythology?” she asked after a long silence.

Hunt had been watching her, thinking to himself that she was the most refreshing personality he had encountered in a long time. It wasn’t just that she was curious about everything, which was an attraction in itself, and that she took the trouble to find out something about the things that intrigued her; she did it without making an attention-getting display of it, or taking it to the point of where it started to get tedious. Her judgment in knowing how far to go was just right, which was one of the first things in making people attractive to be around. In the course of the meal she had won the company’s acceptance by refraining from thrusting herself on them, listening to Danchekker’s expositions without pandering like a student, putting Duncan at ease by not flaunting her femininity, and avoiding triggering rivalry vibes from Sandy. In fact, she and Sandy had gotten along instantly, like sisters.

“Do you know, you’ve never come back with a line that I expected, yet,” Hunt replied.

“Seriously, I read about it somewhere. There’s a kind of horned wolf with talons that’s exactly like the Slavonic ‘kikimora.’ Another has parts of what look like a lion, a peacock, and a dog, just like the ‘simurgh’ of Iran. And would you believe a plumed, goggle-eyed reptile, practically identical to all those Mexican carvings?”

“I seem to remember something about it, but it isn’t an area I’ve really looked at,” Hunt said. “Why? What’s the significance?”

“Oh, nothing earth-shattering. It just occurred to me that maybe that was where we got them from. Perhaps the Jevlenese agents that came to Earth in the past mixed ideas of their own animal forms into the belief systems that they spread.”

“It’s an intriguing thought,” Hunt agreed. He stubbed his cigarette and looked across at her. “Doesn’t it come into this new book that you’re talking about?”

“Sure. That’s why I’m interested in collecting opinions.”

“When we talked back at my place, you said you thought Christ might have been one of them.” Hunt paused and frowned. “No, wait a minute. It was the other way around, wasn’t it. You said he was on the other side, right?”

“If he was Jevlenese, it was as a rebel working against their cause,” Gina replied. “Or he could simply have been an exceptionally enlightened Terran. Either way, he wasn’t working with them.”

Hunt looked at her with interest as he refilled their cups from the coffeepot on the table. “What makes you say that?”

“Well, think about it. The operation that the Jevlenese setup was aimed at retarding Earth’s development by implanting notions of the supernatural and starting mass movements based on irrationality. That’s where early religions came from. The Lunarians didn’t have anything like that.”

“Yes, exactly.” Hunt looked puzzled. “But isn’t…

Gina shook her head, reading the question. “No. He didn’t. What people have been told for the best part of two thousand years is wrong. He didn’t teach what the churches say he taught. What they daren’t tell their followers is the one thing he was trying to say. You see — that’s exactly the kind of thing I want to get into.”

Hunt stared back curiously. “Go on,” he said.

“He told people not to listen to the Pharisees, scribes, priests, or other self-important persons and institutions who were out to control them and exploit them. He taught, simply, that inner integrity and honesty were essential if you want to know yourself and the world. It didn’t have anything to do with rituals and dogma, or rules for organizations. It was simply a prescription for a personal code of conduct and ethics aimed at coming to terms with one’s nature and with reality. In other words, a philosophy of individual self-knowledge and responsibility, totally compatible with the notions of science and reason that were beginning to emerge at the time, despite all the efforts of the Jevlenese. And that, of course, made him dangerous. A threat to their whole operation.” She looked pointedly at Hunt. His eyes widened. Gina nodded. “Exactly. So they got rid of him. Then they exterminated his followers, seized control of what he’d started, and rewrote the whole script.”

“Giving us the Dark Ages,” Hunt said, seeing the point.

“Right. Which stopped everything dead and put their program back on track. The medieval Church with its Inquisition, holy wars, land grabbing, and its involvements in European power politics had nothing to do with anything Christ taught. It was trying to stave off the Renaissance, which the Jevlenese could see coming. Real Christianity had been dead for centuries.”

It fitted with the things Gina had said at his apartment on how things might have gone otherwise, Hunt recalled. She had done more work on it than he had realized. If a lot of powerful institutions had roots in those kinds of murky waters, he could understand why nobody was doing very much talking. At the same time, it was dawning on him just how devastating the book that she was proposing could be. Caldwell would have seen it, too. Small wonder, then, that Caldwell had declined to involve UNSA officially. The wonder was that Caldwell had been willing to have anything to do with her at all.

“Except, maybe, in one place,” Gina said, making it sound like an afterthought.

“Uh?” Hunt returned abruptly from his thoughts.

“If my reading of history is right, there was one place where Christianity might have hung on long after it was stamped out across the rest of Europe,” Gina said.

“Where?”

“Ireland.”

Hunt’s eyebrows lifted in surprise. “Begorrah!” he exclaimed.

Gina went on. “Even the Irish aren’t told the true story. They’re taught that Saint Patrick converted the island in the fifth century, and they’ve remained staunchly faithful ever since.”

“That’s what I always thought, too,” Hunt said. “Not that it’s a subject that I’ve ever had much reason to get involved in, especially.”

“They didn’t ally with the Roman Church until the sixteenth century — more than a thousand years later; and that was only as a gesture of defiance against the English after Henry VIII broke away. Roman Catholicism became a symbol of Irish nationalism. What Saint Patrick brought was Christianity.”

“You mean the original?”

“Something a lot closer to it, anyhow. And it flourished because it fitted with the ways of the native culture. It spread from there through Scotland and England into northern Europe. But then it collided with the institutionalized Jevlenese counterfeit being pushed northward, and it was destroyed. The first papal mission didn’t reach England until a hundred sixty-five years after Patrick died.”

“How do you know all this?”

“My mother’s side of the family comes from Wexford. I go there for vacations and lived there for a while once.”

“When did Patrick die?” Hunt asked, realizing that he really, had no idea.

“In the fifth century. He was probably born in Wales and carried across by pirates.”

“So we’re talking about a long time before that, then.”

“Oh yes. In terms of literature and learning, they were unsurpassed anywhere in Western Europe long before Caesar crossed the Channel.”

“Let me see, every English schoolboy knows that. Fifty-five B.C., yes?”

“Right. Their race was unique, descended from a mixture of Celts and a pre-Celtic stock from the eastern Mediterranean.” Gina stared across the room and smiled to herself. “It wasn’t at all the kind of repressive thing that people were conditioned to think of later, you know. It was a very earthy, zestful, life-loving culture.”

“In what kind of way?” Hunt asked.

“The way women were treated, for a start. They were completely equal, with full rights of property — unusual in itself, for the times. Sex was a considered a healthy and enjoyable part of life, the way it ought to be. Nobody connected it with sinning.”

“The real life of Riley, eh?” Hunt commented.

“They had an easygoing attitude to all personal relations. Polygamy was fairly normal. And then, so was polyandry. So you could have a string of wives, but each of them might have several husbands. But if a particular match didn’t work out, it was easy to dissolve. You just went to a holy place, stood back-to-back, said the right words, and walked ten paces. So children weren’t emotionally crippled by having to grow up with two people hating each other in a self-imposed prison; but if the marriage didn’t work out, they weren’t traumatized, either, because they had so many other anchor points among this network of people who liked each other.”

“It all sounds very civilized to me,” Hunt said.

“And that was where early Christianity hung on,” Gina said again. “So maybe it gives us an idea of what it really had to say.”

Hunt watched the faraway expression on Gina’s face for a few seconds, then grinned impudently. “Oh, I can see where you’re coming from,” he teased. “It’s nothing to do with humanist philosophies at all. You just like the thought of having a string of men to pick from.”

“Well, why should men have all the fun?” she retorted, refusing to be put on the defensive.

“Ahah! The real Gina emerges.”

“I’m merely stating a principle.”

“What’s wrong with it? Don’t women fantasize?”

“Of course they do.” She caught the look in his eye and smiled impishly. “And yes, who knows? Maybe one day if you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.”

Hunt laughed and picked up his coffee cup. He finished the contents and allowed the silence to draw a curtain across the subject. “How are we doing for time?” he asked, setting the cup down. “Will any of the others be in the bar yet?”

Gina glanced at her watch. “It’s a bit early. What else is there to see of the ship?”

“Oh, I think I’ve had it with being dragged around for one day. You know, I really do make a lousy tourist.”

“That’s too bad. I can’t wait to see Jevlen. Just imagine, a real, actual, alien planet. And we’ll be there tomorrow. I still haven’t really gotten over all this.”

Hunt looked at her thoughtfully. “Maybe we don’t have to keep you waiting that long,” he said.

Gina looked puzzled. “Why? What are you talking about?”

“What you just said has given me an idea…VISAR, are there any couplers nearby?”

“A bank of them, to the right outside the door you came in through,” VISAR replied.

“Are there two free right now?”

“What are you doing?” Gina murmured.

“Wait, and you’ll see.”

“Plenty,” VISAR replied.

Hunt stood up. “Come on,” he said to Gina. “You haven’t seen half of Ganymean communications yet. This’ll be the fastest interstellar trip you ever dreamed of. I guarantee it.”