Slowly, Ewen crossed out the names, leaving only "Father; unknown."
"That's all we can say for sure," he said at last, "I'll leave it at that."
In the large building which still served as refectory, kitchen and recreation hall--although a separate group-kitchen was going up, built of the heavy pale translucent native stone--a group of women from the New Hebrides Commune, in their tartan skirts and the warm uniform coats they wore with them now, were preparing dinner. One of them, a girl with long red hair, was singing in a light soprano voice:
When the day wears away,
Sad I wander by the water,
Where a man, born of sun,
Wooed the fairy's daughter,
Why should I sit and sigh,
Pulling bracken, pulling bracken
All alone and weary?
She broke off as Judy came in:
"Dr. Lovat, everything's ready, I told them you were over at the hospital. So we went ahead without you."
"Thank you, Fiona. Tell me, what was that you were singing?"
"Oh, one of our island songs," Fiona said. "You don't speak Gaelic? I thought not--well, it's called the Fairy's Love Song--about a fairy who fell in love with a mortal man, and wanders the hills of Skye forever, still looking for him, wondering why he never came back to her. It's prettier in Gaelic."
"Sing it in Gaelic, then," Judy said, "it would be fearfully dull if only one language survived here! Fiona, tell me, the Father doesn't come to meals in the common room, does he?"
"No, someone takes it out to him."
"Can I take it out today? I'd like to talk to him," Judy said, and Fiona checked a rough work-schedule posted on the wall. "I wonder if we'll ever get permanent work-assignments until we know who's pregnant and who isn't? All right, I'll tell Elsie you've got it. It's one of those sacks over there."
She found Father Valentine toiling away in the graveyard, surrounded by the great stones he was heaving into place in the monument He took the food from her and unwrapped it,laying it out on a flat stone. She sat down beside him and said quietly, "Father, I need your help. I don't suppose you'd hear my confession?"
He shook his head slowly. "I'm not a priest any more, Dr. Lovat. How in the name of anything holy can I have the insolence to pass judgment in the name of God on someone else's sins?" He smiled faintly. He was a small slight man, no older than thirty, but now he looked haggard and old. "In any case, I've had a lot of time to think, heaving rocks out here. How can I honestly preach or teach the Gospel of Christ on a world where He never set foot? If God wants this world saved he'll have to send someone to save it… whatever that means." He put a spoon into the bowl of meat and grain. "You brought your own lunch? Good. In theory I accept isolation. In practice I find I crave the company of my fellow man much more than I ever thought I would."
His words dismissed the question of religion, but Judy, in her inner turmoil, could not let it drop so easily. "Then you're just leaving us without pastoral help of any sort, Father?"
"I don't think I ever did much in that line," Father Valentine said. "I wonder if any priest ever did? It goes without saying that anything I can do for anyone as a friend, I'll do--it's the least I can do; if I spent my life at it, it wouldn't begin to balance out what I did, but it's better than sitting around in sackcloth and ashes mouthing penitential prayers."
The woman said, "I can understand that, I suppose. But do you really mean there's no room for faith, or religion, Father?"
He made a dismissing gesture. "I wish you wouldn't call me 'father'. Brother, if you want to. We've all got to be brothers and sisters in misfortune here. No, I didn't say that, Doctor Lovat--I don't know your Christian name--Judith? I didn't say that, Judith. Every human being needs belief in the goodness of some power that created him, no matter what he calls it, and some religious or ethical structure. But I don't think we need sacraments or priesthoods from a world that's only a memory, and won't even be that to our children and our children's children. Ethics, yes. Art, yes. Music, crafts, knowledge, humanity--yes. But not rituals which will quickly dwindle down into superstitions. And certainly not
a social code or a set of purely arbitrary behavioral attitudes which have nothing to do with the society we're in now."
"Yet you would have worked in the Church structure at the Coronis colony?"
"I suppose so. I hadn't really thought about it. I belong to the Order of Saint Christopher of Centaurus, which was organized to carry the Reformed Catholic Church to the stars, and I simply accepted it as a worthy cause. I never really thought about it--not serious, hard, deep thought. But out here on my rock pile I've had a lot of time to think." He smiled faintly. "No wonder they used to put criminals to breaking rocks, back on Earth. It keeps your hands busy and gives you all your time for thought."
Judy said slowly, "So you don't think behavioral ethics are absolute, then? There's nothing definite or divinely ordained about them here?"
"How can there be? Judith, you know what I did. If I hadn't been brought up with the idea that certain things were in themselves, and of their very nature, enough to send me straight to hell, then when I woke up after the Wind, I could have lived with it. I might have been ashamed, or upset, or even sick at my stomach, but I wouldn't have had the conviction, deep down in my mind, that none of us deserved to live after it. In the seminary there were no shades of right and wrong, just virtue and sin, and nothing in between. The murders didn't trouble me, in my madness, because I was taught in seminary that lewdness was a mortal sin for which I could go to hell, so how could murder be any worse? You can go to hell only once, and I was already damned. A rational ethic would have told me that whatever those poor crewmen, God rest them, and I, had done during that night of madness, it had harmed only our dignity and our sense of decency, if that mattered. It was miles away, galaxies away, from murder."
Judy said, "I'm no theologian, Fa--er--Valentine, but can anyone truly commit a mortal sin in a state of complete insanity?"
"Believe me, I've been through that one and out the other side. It doesn't help to know that if I'd been able to run to my own confessor and get his forgiveness for all the things I did in my madness--ugly things by some standards, but essentially harmless I might have been able to keep from killing those poor men. There has to be something wrong with a system that means you can take guilt on and off like an overcoat. As for madness--nothing can come out in madness that wasn't there already. What I really couldn't face, I begin to realize, wasn't just the knowledge that in madness I'd done some forbidden things with other men, it was the knowledge that I'd done them gladly and willingly, that I no longer believed they were very wrong, and that forever after, any time I saw those men, I'd remember the time when our minds were completely open to one another and we knew each other's minds and bodies and hearts in the most total love and sharing any human beings could know. I knew I could never hide it again, and so I took out my little pocket knife and started trying to hide from myself." He smiled wryly, a terrible death's head grin. "Judith, Judith, forgive me, you came to ask me for help, you asked me to hear your confession, and you've ended up listening to mine."
She said very gently, "If you're right, we'll all have to be priests to each other, at least as far as listening to each other and giving what help we can." One phrase he had spoken seized on her, and she repeated it aloud. "Our minds were open to one another… the most total love and sharing any human beings could know. That seems to be what this world has done to us. In different degrees, yes--but to all of us in some way or other. That's what he said"--and slowly, searching for words, she told him about the alien, their first meeting in the wood, how he had sent for her during the Wind, and the strange things he had told her, without speech.