Did I go to a monastery to make myself morally perfect?
No, not at all.
What, then?
The monk’s ultimate goal is direct union with the Godhead, But to aim at that goal is to miss it altogether. His task is to rid himself of ego so that consciousness, once its usual discordant mental content dumped out of it through ritual prayer and meditation, may experience nonself as a living formlessness and emptiness into which God may come, if it please Him to come. So Eckhart had spoken of it two thousand years ago: “God gives birth to His Son in the soul.” Only in self-emptiness may it happen one day that Christ awaken within the monk, as I-to-I. But there was someone else awake there now, for Blacktooth, and he was very lonely, very lonely for her.
CHAPTER 9
The third degree of humility is that a person
for the love of God submits himself to his
Superior in all obedience, imitating the Lord,
of whom the Apostle says, “He became
obedient even unto death.”
PLEASED BY THE INCREASE IN HIS LIVING allowance, Blacktooth planned to change his residence as soon as the crowd left town after the election, but for the time being he was forced to continue living with the students. Wooshin would be leaving in a few days at the cardinal’s bidding.
When he came home from work on the afternoon of Holy Tuesday, the student named Aberlott called “Catch!” and tossed something to him as soon as he came through the door. Blacktooth grabbed for it, missed, and turned to pick it up when it bounced off the wall. Looking down at the object, he froze m a half-crouch.
“What’s wrong?” the student asked. “Isn’t it yours? She said it belonged to you.”
Blacktooth picked it up and turned to stare at Aberlott. “She?” he gasped.
“The nun. My God, what is the matter? You’re white as snow.”
“Nun?”
“Sure. One of the stricter orders, I believe. Brown habit, white coif. Barefoot. Isn’t that your rosary? She said you left it in the cardinal’s coach.”
“Was she a genny?”
“A genny? Not that I could tell. She didn’t wear the headband. Of course, celibate religious don’t have to. You can’t see much of a nun except her face and hands and feet. She was rather pretty for a nun though. She didn’t look like a genny to me. You were expecting a genny?”
Blacktooth sat down on his bed and stared at the beads and the cross. The silver had been carefully cleaned of tarnish, and the beads seemed brighter than he remembered, well polished now.
“Did she say anything else?”
“No, not that I recall. We talked a little about the conclave. I was trying to flirt, I guess. She was kind, but she was distant. Oh, she did ask where you were, in an offhand way. That’s all.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I said you were usually at the Secretariat this time of day. I don’t think she was actually looking for you though. She went off in the opposite direction. Just wanted to return the rosary, I think. I wondered what she was doing in the cardinal’s carriage.”
“Looting it,” he whispered.
“What did you say?”
Blacktooth lay back on the bench and closed his eyes. After a long time, he said, “Thank you, Aberlott.”
“Don’t mention it.” The student resumed his reading. Perhaps the nun was really a nun. Ædrea had given the rosary to a nun, that’s all. It was all right for a genny to be a nun and not wear the green headband, but for a genny to impersonate a religious in order to conceal ancestry was a crime under the laws of the Denver Republic, as everywhere. Persecution of the genetically diseased was nearly universal. They were protected only by the law of the Church, but not to the extent of allowing the impersonation of religious. And while the Church might protest against discriminatory legislation by the secular authority, she had never taken a firm stand against eugenic laws designed to prevent intermarriage between the healthy and the children of the Pope. Nor had she resisted laws defining the marriageability of citizens in terms of degrees of kinship to known freaks. The baptismal records of Churches were used as evidence in secular courts, and priests were required to note the pedigrees of parents on certificates of baptism. Before any couple were given a license to marry by the secular arm, both had to undress and be tested by the medical inspectors of a civil magistrate. The Nomads, of course, had their own rules, but there was no tolerance among them for deformity, hereditary or otherwise. They simply killed the deformed at birth.
He fingered the beads of his rosary and decided that Ædrea must have given it to a nun in a party of religious traveling up the papal highway. He felt shame for the fear and hope that surged within him when he turned to pick it up. Surely, it must have been a nun. What the police would do to a genny impersonating a citizen was nothing compared to what a mob would do. And surely, Ædrea herself would not have polished the beads and cleaned the crucifix so. If she had sent it back sooner, he would have escaped that horrid moment in confession about bartering it for sex, as Specklebird construed it. But why had she returned it at all, even indirectly?
“What color was her hair?” he called to the student, who was immersed in a textbook.
“Whose hair?”
“The nun.”
“Which—? Oh! Her coif hid it.” He paused. “Probably blond. She was very fair.”
Blacktooth stirred uneasily. Blondes were not plentiful, but there were probably dozens of them in Valana. The mixed ancestry of the continent’s population produced skin colors in varying shades of brown, but fair skin and black skin were both rather rare, as were red and blond hair.
He arose from the bench and went outside. There was nobody in the street but an old man and two children. The rotten smell from the creek behind the house was particularly strong this afternoon. Several neighbors had become ill lately, probably from the creek or its vapors. He decided to take a walk up the hill, in the direction away from the Secretariat.
He walked for an hour. There were fewer and fewer houses as he moved along. At last he came to a guard post at the fenced limits of the city. Beyond it lay only forest and a few hermitages, including the home of Amen Specklebird. He stopped to speak to the sentry.
“How long have you been on duty, corporal?”
The young officer looked toward the sun, hanging low in the west. “About four hours, I guess. Why?”
“Did a young nun pass this way? Brown robe, white coif...”
The sentry immediately looked toward the woods, studied Blacktooth for a moment, and began to leer. “Oh, ho! I wondered why she was going out there alone.”
Angered by the leer, the monk turned and hiked back down the road for home. The anger turned to fear again. He knew it was fear for Ædrea, but she was probably safe at home in Arch Hollow. The nun was just a nun. And yet if nuns had a small convent farther up the hillside, would the sentry have wondered about her destination?
He dreamed that night that he was wearing a green headband and fleeing from a mob who wanted to castrate him for lying with Torrildo, who had breasts as large as Ædrea’s, or was it Ædrea with a penis as large as Torrildo’s? He was trapped in Shard’s barn, which now housed Brother Kornhoer’s old generator and the chair of electricity from the chapel. Someone was screaming. Rough hands were strapping him into the chair when somebody shook him awake. The rough hands belonged to Wooshin.