“But I didn’t do anything,” Hewlitt broke in, “except wrestle with it. I told you to tell it that.”
“I did,” said the Padre, “but it said that, just in case you did do something, it is grateful. It has trouble believing in miracles, too.”
“There are no miracles,” said Hewlitt, not for the first time. “There are just natural laws that we don’t understand or haven’t discovered yet. Because we understand how this one works, it is one miracle we perform several times a day without even thinking about it. Right?”
As he spoke, Hewlitt switched on the bedside communicator and keyed in the library menu, wondering if Lioren might take the hint and go away. It had not done so on previous occasions and the Padre was nothing if not consistent.
“A few centuries ago, vision transmission would have been a miracle,” Lioren agreed, and went on, “Morredeth is very pleased and proud about the overall condition of its fur. It insisted on me placing my hands along its flanks and feeling the thickness and mobility which, it claimed, has never before felt so good. On Tarla such an activity is conducted only in circumstances of intimacy and deep emotional involvement, but Morredeth wanted me to feel its fur and at such times I can be a complete moral coward. The sensation was peculiar, unexpected, and very difficult to describe. Ifelt…”
“Utterly ridiculous?” asked Hewlitt. “That was howl felt when the same thing happened with Horrantor. Medalont asked me, as a clinical experiment, to lay my hands on the Tralthan’s damaged limb. According to the senior physician, Horrantor’s leg injury has complications that are slow to respond to treatment. Medalont, Leethveeschi, two Orligian nurses, and the resuscitation team were standing by in case something dramatic happened. I think they were all relieved, even Horrantor, when nothing did.
“There was no second miracle. Sorry.”
“No need to apologize,” said Lioren. “I feel like they did. Miracles make me very uncomfortable and insecure in my beliefs and disbeliefs, and I would as soon have proof that they did not happen.
“They don’t, Padre,” said Hewlitt. “Can we talk about something else?”
“It must be nice to feel such certainty,” said Lioren, flexing its medial arms in a gesture that would probably have meant something to another Tarlan. “But I wonder if, in all the vastness of space and time and the immutable laws of cause and effect and perfect balance of forces that is Creation, there isn’t room for the occasional miracle. But why did it happen here?”
Hewlitt shook his head, seeing no chance of getting away from the interminable subject of Morredeth’s fur and the inevitable religious argument, and said, “It didn’t happen here. Miracles are impossible, Padre. If they were to exist in your big, complicated, wellordered universe, or Creation as you call it, they would be out of place, a defect in the perfect Scheme of Things. There is simply no room for miracles in your universe.”
“An interesting philosophical idea,” said Lioren. “It suggests that our Creation is flawed because an apparently supernatural event or events took place within it. Bearing in mind the hypothetical attributes of the Supreme Being, why should He, She, or It create an imperfection of any kind?”
“I don’t know,” he replied. “This isn’t my area of expertise. But can we suppose that this universe was created as a prototype, an early model that requires modification and a little fine-tuning from time to time. The intrusion of random supernatural events into a universe supposedly based on natural laws might be evidence of this tinkering. Thank God… Oops, just a figure of speech, Padre… it doesn’t happen very often.”
“If you believe that…” the other began.
“I am not believing anything, Padre, just talking.”
The Tarlan was silent for a moment, then it said, “If this universe is imperfect, that presupposes, eternity being what it is, without beginning or end, that there was, is, will be one that is perfect. Would you like to, ah, just talk about that for a while?”
“I haven’t had a chance to think it out properly,” he replied, smiling, “so I am making it up as I go along. Unlike this universe, everything would be perfect. There would be no natural laws, because if they were present it would mean that it, too, had faults and was in need of tinkering. There would be no time, no space, no physical or mental restrictions so that every event that took place would be miraculous. I expect you, and the other believers living in this imperfect creation, would call it Heaven.”
“Go on,” said Lioren.
Hewlitt said, “The difficulty I and an awful lot of other people have with religions is that they do not adequately explain why there is so much evil, or more accurately, tragic accidents, natural disasters, and illness, gross misbehavior in individuals and groups toward each other and, in short, so much suffering in this universe. Living in an imperfect Creation would go a long way to explaining why these things happen, especially when there is the expectation of moving to the perfected universe after death.
“This is a pretty heretical theory,” Hewlitt ended. “I hope my irreverence hasn’t offended you, Padre?”
“I agree,” said Lioren. “Heretical and irreverent, but not entirely new to me. To do my work here I need a wide knowledge of the religious beliefs and practices of many worlds, and often the many religions practiced on a single world. I am reminded of the writings of an Earth-human theologian called Augustine who was in the habit of wondering aloud, but in reality asking polite but awkward questions of its God. One of the questions was ‘What were You doing before You made the universe?’ There is no record of this Augustine person ever receiving an answer, at least not during its lifetime on Earth, but you have taken the idea a stage further by suggesting that the Creator of All Things has produced a prototype which we are still inhabiting.
“I am not offended or even surprised, Patient Hewlitt,” it went on. “Where other-species’ religious beliefs are concerned, nothing surprises me. But the VTXM Telfi single entity I have been visiting these past few days came very close to doing so. It, they, share the belief that they were created in God’s image, but that their omniscient and all-powerful Creator is composed of an infinite number of small, weak, and individually stupid entities like themselves who together make up a Supreme Being which one day they hope to join.
“For a species who evolved intelligence and a civilization,” the Padre went on, “by linking together into a gestalt of individually specialized beings, it is understandable why they would believe such a thing. But I found it very difficult at first to understand or talk to it about the infinite number of persons that will make up its one God, or to give the spiritual consolation it needs. Of course, there are many religions which believe that there is a small part of God in every thinking creature… Do you know anything about the Telfi?”
“A little,” said Hewlitt, still trying to steer the other away from the subject of theology and, by association, miracles. “There was a brief entry in the nonmedical library’s listing of Federation citizens. They operate in groups as contact telepaths to pool their mental and physical abilities. They live by absorbing the combination and varying intensities of hard radiation that bathes their home world, which circles very close to the parent sun. For travel off-planet their ship life-support radiation has to be reproduced artificially. Sometimes the environmental systems malfunction and, if they are lucky, they are rescued and end up here. But they are radiation-eaters, and no ordinary person could get close enough to them to talk and hope to go on living. Did you use a communicator or wear protective armor?”
“Thank you for the implication that I might be an extraordinary person,” said the Padre. It made an untranslatable, Tarlan sound and went on, “But the answer to both questions is no. There is a fallacy among nonmedics that the Telfi cannot be closely approached or touched without the use of remotely controlled manipulators. To live they must absorb the radiation normally provided by their natural environment but when, for clinical reasons, the radiation is withdrawn for several days and they are weak from their equivalent of hunger, their radioactive emissions drop to a harmless level. When one of them was withdrawn from its treatment chamber during my visit, I was close enough to be able to touch it, which I did.