Theresa stopped, gasping. What had she been saying? Pouring out all that to this stranger, this poised woman whom she didn’t even know, like some sort of whining baby…
“You are right in your search,” Sister Anne said, “but wrong in your conclusions.”
She spoke with utter conviction. And yet Theresa felt confused; she didn’t think she’d stated any conclusions, hadn’t been able to come to any. Wasn’t that the problem?
“I don’t understand, Sister.”
“How old are you, Ms. Aranow?”
“Eighteen,” she said, and waited for the smile. It didn’t come.
“You say the beliefs you’ve examined—from Yagaiism to Zen—all contradict each other, as well as being either internally inconsistent or inconsistent with your observed experience, and therefore all cannot be true. That is your error.”
“What?” Theresa cried. “What’s my error?”
“They are all true. Every last one of every belief you named. Plus atheism, Druidism, cannibalism, and devil worship.”
Theresa gaped at her.
“The fact is, my lost child, that truth is not so simple. It is solid, and large, and bright enough to banish the darkness—but it is not simple.”
“I don’t understand,” Theresa faltered. She had a sudden picture of Cazie watching Sister Anne from the corner of the white-walled room: Cazie with her head tilted, her golden eyes scornfully bright, smiling at them both. Always smiling. Irony, Tessie. Don’t lose your irony.
“Everything is true, under difference circumstances. Men are good, and men are sinful. God is all-powerful, and God cannot choose for each soul. Love is greater than justice, and justice greater than love. How else could the Church have changed over more than two millennia, and still be the Church? Sometimes heretics must be rooted out and destroyed, and sometimes heretics must be embraced, and sometimes heretics are we ourselves. All of it is true. But humankind cannot see all of truth at once, and so in each age we see what we can. There are fashions in truth, as in all else. And under the fashions, the largeness abides.”
“But, Sister… but if everything is true…”
“Then the task of the searcher is to set aside the egotism of perception and see as much of God as each can.”
The egotism of perception. Theresa struggled with the concept. “You mean… we can’t see it all, so we must trust the rest is there? On faith?”
“That’s part of it. But there’s more involved. We must literally set aside the smallness of our perceptions—the limits of our perceptions—and see what was hidden to us before.”
“But how?” And then, more quietly, “How?”
Sister Anne stood and walked to the door. She opened it and the glorious sound swept back into the room: thirty, fifty voices raised in song, ardent and pure, a rush as heady and perfumed as the smell of summer nights. Theresa closed her eyes and leaned forward, as if the singing were a physical stream and she lowering herself into it.
“Like that,” Sister Anne said.
Irony is always the best defense against self-delusion, Cazie said.
“It’s also the best defense against the risk of any genuine feeling,” Sister Anne said quietly, and Theresa’s eyes flew open and her heart sped, until she realized she must have spoken Cazie’s words aloud.
Theresa stood, too, although she couldn’t have said why. Vespers rose and fell around her, a sea of sweet sound, palpable and powerful as a rush of fresh water. Again her heart sped, but this time without any risk of an attack. Her breathing was calm and deep. Yes, something said inside a deep part of her mind. Yes yes yes!
The nun watched her closely. “Very few people actually belong in this order, Ms. Aranow.”
Theresa said, “I do,” and it seemed to her she had never spoken with such confidence in her life. It was over, then: the uncertainty, the lostness, the tremendous fear. Above all, the fear. Of the strange, the alien, the different. Over. She was home.
Sister Anne smiled; to Theresa, her smile blended with the glory of the music, was the music. “I think maybe you do. Would you like to have the preliminary blood and cerebral-spinal tests now?”
Theresa smiled back. “Tests?”
“To use as an eventual base for your customized neuropharms.”
“My… what?”
“We customize the mix for each postulant, of course. Our lab, which we share with the Jesuits in Saranac Lake, is as advanced at this work as any in the world. Your mix will match anything available in Boston or Copenhagen or Brasilia, for any purpose.”
Theresa said woodenly, “I don’t take neuropharms.”
“You have never taken any like these, certainly. For this purpose, with this result. Not yet.”
“I don’t take them at all.” Dizziness rushed over her, displacing the music. She reached for the back of the chair with both hands.
“I see,” Sister Anne said. “Just as you are unChanged. But, Theresa, they are not the same thing. Neuropharms for the greater glory of God… What did you think I meant when I said we set aside the egotism of perception? That’s a cortical-thalamic function.”
“I don’t know what I thought,” Theresa mumbled. The dizziness grew worse. She clutched the back of the chair.
“Our neuropharms modify activities in the mammillothalamic tract, cortical association areas, and dorsomedial nucleus—no different from modifying biochemistry through fasting or frenzied prayer in other ages. We merely break down the neural barriers to increased levels of attention, perception, and integration of various conscious states. To better know and glorify God.”
“I have to leave now,” Theresa gasped. The room whirled, and her throat closed. She couldn’t breathe. There was no air…
“But, my child—”
“I have… to go! I’m… sorry!”
She stumbled through the open door of the room. Vespers rose around her, stronger as she staggered blindly along the corridor: glorious, fervent, heartbreaking. Theresa yanked at the convent door; it wouldn’t open. She couldn’t talk to order it open. Gasping, she beat on the wood, until someone she couldn’t see through the whirling confusion, someone behind her, opened the door for her and she fell through.
The door closed, cutting off the music.
When she could breathe again, Theresa sat for a long time in her car. Then she lifted it and flew south.
The first tribe she came to had housed itself for the winter in the remains of a pre-Change-Wars Liver town. The three undestroyed buildings were Liver colors: fuchsia, mint, and bright red. Behind the red building stretched a huge sheet of heavy plastic over churned-up earth: a feeding ground. Beyond it lay a pile of broken machines, scooters and ’bots and what looked like water pipes. People, made small and nonthreatening by the aircar’s height, stopped moving and looked up, hands shading their eyes against the cold winter sun. Theresa couldn’t see their faces.