As he lay in the sand, his body ringing with shock, muchly paralyzed, he felt the ropes being put about him, tying his arms to his sides, his hands behind him.
“Make them tight!” she said.
The ropes were drawn tight. They were knotted.
He was then put again to his knees.
She slapped him twice, angrily. She could not hurt him. She did not have the strength. But the blows stung, and they were humiliating. He did not care to be struck, particularly by a woman. One could kill a man. It did not seem right to kill a woman. If he struck her he might have broken her neck. She glared down at him. There was laughter in the stands. She was furious. She stepped back from him. In the stands there must have been many who realized that she, an officer of the court, the daughter of the high judge herself, had been viewed with dilated pupils. But what did she expect, going down on the sand, clad as she was, standing before one who had chosen death to “true manhood,” as it was defined on this world, to the improvement, the smoothing? He had struck a woman only once before, Tessa, who had first slapped him. He had slapped her back. Must she not expect that? But it seems she had not. She had looked up at him with awe, from where she had been flung by the force of the blow, on the floor of the varda coop, to his left. She had then crawled to his feet, begging his forgiveness. He had used her on the floor of the varda coop. After that she would meet him when and where he told her.
With what fury the daughter of the judge regarded him!
He looked away from her. His body was still numb.
The stands were almost full now.
The ropes about his upper body were tight. He could tell that. Still, oddly, it was hard to feel them, at least as one would normally have expected to feel them. It was almost as though they had been put on someone else. He wondered if Brother Benjamin were right, if he were not his body, as he seemed to be, but something else, hidden inside it. If that were so, it might explain why the ropes felt strange, because he was far within his body, far from the ropes. The body, in spite of appearances, its seeming to contain organs, and such, was really a shell, something within which he lived. Indeed, Brother Benjamin had told him that he was really invisible, the real him, that is, the one that lived inside the body, or somewhere. The real person was called the
koos, an old word which had originally meant “breath.” It was Floon, a rational salamander, or salamander-type creature, of the predominantly reptilian world of Zirus, who had first taught, to the surprise of many, as the idea was then new, that the koos was eternal, neither coming into nor going out of existence, but staying right there, wherever it was. A consequence of this idea was that rational creatures could not die, an idea with considerable appeal to rational creatures. The fact that Floon died, and rather miserably, in an electric chair, did little to diminish the persuasiveness of his doctrine. It was discovered that he had not really died but had later appeared simultaneously on several different worlds, reiterating his teachings. His teachings, a generation or two after his apparent death, had been gathered together by followers. The teachings seemed in places to be inconsistent with one another, but inconsistencies may always be reconciled, by drawing suitable distinctions. Too, certain of the teachings, for one reason or another, were rejected as inauthentic. This was done by individuals who had never known Floon, and several generations after his apparent death. Dogs and horses, Brother Benjamin had taught, did not have a koos. He had found this hard to believe, as it seemed they felt pain, and pleasure, and such. Their insides, their organs, and such, were relevant to their life. It was only that this was not the case with the rational creatures, or at least certain of the rational creatures. Rational aquatic mammals were a disputed point. Brother Benjamin believed that Floon was an emanation of Karch, but there was a great deal of controversy on this sort of thing in the worlds. I will briefly sketch the major positions. There was the illusionist position of Fingal, who taught that since Karch, who is perfect, and pain is imperfect, cannot know pain, Floon must have been an illusion, because Floon had apparently felt pain when he had been put in the electric chair. Some folks, of course, thought that Floon was merely a rational salamander, or salamander-type creature, no more, but a gifted, or inspired, prophet. That did not turn the trick, however, for many folks. One then became involved in whether Floon was truly Karch, or only a part of Karch, whether or not they were of the same substance, whatever a substance was, or different substances, or similar substances, or two substances united into one substance in one union, and such, the latter position, perhaps because of its inconsistency, or mystery, tending to become the most popular. In spite of the obvious verbalisms involved, the inability to provide empirical proof for any of these positions, and, indeed, the inability, even apart from questions of mere provability, to empirically discriminate among these various hypotheses, which was doubtless something of an advantage, many people took these notions very seriously. Indeed, many people were killed because of them, usually Floonians by Floonians. This was not unintelligible because it was natural that there would be serious competition for control of various dioceses, and the revenues, power and such, associated with them.