“Sure,” Pete said. “Oh Ho, a Chinese name.” The pot wavered; it was shimmering away. “Oh Ho,” it repeated., “Ho Oh. Oh, Oh, Oh. Ho On. Think of Ho On, Peter Sands, someday when you are talking with Dr. Abernathy. The little clay pot which came from the earth and can, like you, be smashed to bits and return to the earth, which lives only as long as your kind does.”
“ ‘Ho On,’ “ Pete echoed dutifully.
“That which is benign will identify itself by name,” Ho On said, invisible now; it was only a voice, a thinking, mentational entity which had possessed Pete’s mind. “That which won’t is not. We are alike, you and I, equals in a certain real way, made from the same stuff. Peter Sands. I have told you who I am; and from old, Iknew you.”
What a silly name, he thought: Ho On. A silly name for a transitory, breakable pot. Well, he liked it anyhow; it had, as it said, treated him as an equal. And somehow that seemed more important than any vast transcendent significance which the weighty foreign words in the huge book might contain. Words he could not fathom anyhow; they were beyond him. He, like the clay pot Ho On, was too limited. But that was Jesus Christ I saw, he realized. I know it was Him. It looked like Him.
“Anything else you wish to know before I leave?” Ho On’s thoughts came to him, within his head.
Pete Sands said, “Tell me the most important thing that, under any circumstance, could be told. But that’s true.”
Ho On thought, “St. Sophia is going to be reborn. She wasn’t acceptable before.”
He blinked. Who was St. Sophia? It was like telling him that St. Vitus was going to dance again… it was a joke. Keen disappointment filled him. It had simply ended up with something silly, like its name. And now he felt it leave… on that meager, if meaningless, note.
And then the drugs wore off. And he now no longer saw or heard; again he surveyed his living room, his familiar microtapes and projector, his tape-spools, and littered plastic desk; he saw Lurine smoking her pipe, he smelled the cavendish tobacco… his head felt swollen andhe got up unsteadily, knowing that only an instant in real time had passed, and for Lurine nothing had occurred. Nothing had changed. And she was right. This was not an event; Christ had not manifested Himself. What had occurred was that which Pete Sands had hoped for: an augmentation of his own faculties of perception.
“Jesus,” he said aloud.
“What’s the matter?” Lurine asked.
“I saw Him,” he informed her. “He exists. To save us. He’s always there, always will be, has always been.” He walked into the kitchen and poured himself a small quantity, perhaps two thirds of a shot, of bourbon from the precious prewar bottle.
When he returned to the living room Lurine was reading a badly printed magazine, a mimeographed newsletter circulated from town to town here in the Mountain States area. “You merely sit,” he said, incredulous.
“What am I supposed to do? Clap?”
“But it’s important.”
“You saw it; I didn’t.” She continued reading the newsletter; it came from Provo, Utah.
“But He’s there for you, too,” Pete said.
“Good.” She nodded absently.
He seated himself, feeling weak and nauseated; side-effects from the pills. There was silence and then Lurine spoke again, still absently.
“The SOWs are sending the inc, Tibor McMasters, on a Pilg. To find the God of Wrath and capture his essence for their murch.”
“What in god’s name is a ‘murch’?” SOW jargon; he did not ever understand.
“Church mural.” She glanced up. “They speculate he’ll have to travel well over a thousand miles; it’s Los Angeles, I believe.”
“You think I care?” he said furiously.
“I think,” she said, laying aside the newsletter, then, and frowning thoughtfully, “that you ought to go along on the Pilg and then about fifty miles from here cut a leg off that cow that pulls Tiber’s cart. Or short out his metabattery.” She sounded perfectly, composedly serious.
“Why?”
“So he can’t bring back the essence. For the mural.”
“It couldn’t matter less to me if—”
He broke off. Because someone had come to the door of his meager abode; he heard footsteps, then his dog Tom Swift And His Electric Magic Carpet barking. The bell clingled. Rising, he strode to the door.
Dr. Abernathy, his superior, the priest of the Charlottesville Combined Christian Church, stood there in his black cassock. “Is this too late to call on you?” Dr. Abernathy said, his round, small, bunlike face gracious in its formal concern not to be a bother.
“Come in.” Pete held the door wide. “You know Miss Rae, Doctor.”
“The Lord be with you,” Dr. Abernathy said to her, nodding.
Immediately, correctly, she answered, “And with thy spirit.” She rose. “Good evening, Doctor.”
“I heard,” Dr. Abernathy said, “that you are considering entering our church, taking confirmation and then the greater sacraments.”
“Well,” Lurine said, “I was—you know. Dissatisfied. I mean, who wants to worship the former Chairman of the ERDA?”
Dr. Abernathy passed into the tiny kitchen, and put the tea kettle on, to boil water for coffee. “You would be welcome,” he said to her.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Lurine said.
“But to be confirmed you would need half a year of intensive religious instruction. On many topics: the sacraments, the rituals, the basic tenets of the Church. What we believe and also why. I hold adult-instruction classes two afternoons a week.” He added, with a trace of embarrassment, “I have at present one adult receiving instruction. You could catch up very quickly; you have a bright, fertile mind. Meanwhile, you could attend services… however, you could not come to the rail, could not take Holy Communion; you realize that.”
“Yes.” She nodded.
“Have you been baptized?”
“I—” She hesitated. “Frankly, I don’t know.”
“We would baptize you with the special service for those who may have been baptized before. With water. Anything else—such as rose petals, as they used to do it before the war in Los Angeles—that does not count. By the way—I hear that Tibor is about to set forth on a Pilg. It’s no secret, of course; my hearing of it verifies that. The Eltern of the Servants of Wrath, the rumor-mill says, have provided him with maps and photos and data, so that he can find Lufteufel. All I hope is that his cow holds out.” Returning to the living room, he said to Pete Sands, “How about a little poker? Three does not seem to me enough, but we can play for genuine old copper cents. And no crazy games such as spit-in-the-ocean and baseball, just seven-card stud and straight and draw.”
“Okay,” Pete said, nodding. “But let’s allow one wild card, dealer’s choice, since there’re only three of us.”
“Fine,” Dr. Abernathy said, as Pete walked off to get the deck and the box of chips. He drew a comfortable chair up to the table for Lurine Rae and then one for himself and at last one for Pete.
“And no chattering during the game,” Pete said to Lurine.
They were dealing a hand of five-card draw, jacks or better to open, when the cow-drawn cart of Tibor McMasters, battery-lamp sweeping ahead of it, pulled up at the door and tinkled its hopeful bell.
Studying his hand, Dr. Abernathy said thoughtfully in a preoccupied and abstracted way, “Um, I—uh—fold. So I’ll go.” He rose, to go to the door: to answer the presence of the well-known inc SOW artist.
On his cart, Tibor McMasters surveyed the progress of the poker game, and the conversation had that unique equal quality: everyone said as much as everyone else, although each player had his idiosyncratic mumble; and none of it, Tibor realized, meant anything—it was merely a noise, a banter, as their collective attention kept fixed on the play itself.