"However, Olivia was certain that he was not as absentminded as he believed. She insisted that he could not have been, that some part of his mind must have observed the baby's situation. He did not really want a son. Unlike most men, he preferred daughters. Besides , the baby was sickly from birth, a nuisance. To Sam, I mean.''
"That's one thing in his favor," Jill said. "I mean, that he preferred girls. Though I suppose, to be fair, that it is as neurotic to prefer a female infant as to prefer a male. Still, he did not have that male chauvinism ..."
Cyrano said, "You must comprehend that Olivia did not consciously acknowledge all this during her Terrestrial existence. At least, she claimed not to have done so, though I suspect that she had such thoughts, was ashamed of them, and so put them away in the deep, dark files of her soul. But it was here, in this Valley, when she became addicted to chewing the soi-disant, the so-called dream-gum, that she perceived her true feelings.
"And so, though she still loved Clemens, in a manner of speaking, she hated him even more."
"Did she quit using the gum?"
"Yes. It upset her too much. Though she now and then had some ecstatic or fantastic visions, she had too many horrible experiences."
"She should have stuck with it," Jill said. "But under proper guidance. However ..."
"Yes?"
Jill compressed her lips, than said, "Perhaps I shouldn't be too bloody critical. I had a guru, a beautiful woman, the best and wisest woman I ever knew, but she couldn't keep me from running headlong into... well, no need to go into it here ... it was too... dismaying? No, horrifying. I chickened out. So I shan't be criticizing anyone else, shouldn't anyway. I have been considering taking it up again, but I don't trust the Second Chancers' use of it, even though they claim to have excellent, quite safe, techniques. I couldn't put full confidence in people who have their religious beliefs."
" I was a free thinker, a libertin, as we styled ourselves," Cyrano said. "But now... I do not know. Perhaps there is after all a God. Otherwise, how does one account for this world?"
"There are a score of theories," Jill said.'' And no doubt you've heard them all."
'' Many, at any rate,'' Cyrano said. " I was hoping to hear a new one from you."
15
At that moment, several people invaded the conversation.
Jill broke off from the clump and drifted around, looking for another clump, a temporary colony, to attach herself to. In The Riverworld, as on Earth, all cocktail or after-dinner parties were alike. You spoke briefly, trying to make yourself heard above all the chatter and music, and then changed partners or groups until you had made a complete circuit. If you were intrigued or even interested in someone, you could make arrangements to see him or her some other time, when you could have a chance for an uninterrupted and quiet conversation.
In the old days, long ago, when she was young in mind, she had often met men or women at such gatherings who enthralled her. But then she had been full of booze or pot or both and so wide open. It was easy to fall in love with a mind or body-or both at the same time. Sobering up usually meant wising up. A disappointment. Not always. Just most of the time.
Here was a gathering all of whom had the bodies of twenty-five-year-olds. Chronologically, she was sixty-one. Some here might actually be one hundred and thirty-two or even more. The youngest could not be under thirty-six.
The index of wisdom should be high, if it was true that age brought wisdom. She had not found that to be true about most people on Earth. Experience was something it was difficult to avoid, though many people had managed to keep it to a minimum. Experience did not by any means give-wisdom, that understanding of the basic mechanics of humanity. Most oldsters she had known had been as governed by conditioned reflexes as when they had been nineteen.
So it was expected that people would not have benefited much from their experiences here. However, the hammer blows of death and resurrection had broken open the seals of the minds of many.
For one thing, absolutely no one had expected this type of afterlife, if you could call this an afterlife. No religion had described such a place, such events. Though, to tell the truth, those religions which did promise paradises and hells were remarkably lacking in descriptive detail. Perhaps not so remarkably, since very few persons had actually claimed to have seen the postmortem world.
And there certainly was nothing supernatural about this place and the raising of the dead in it. Everything-well, not everything but almost everything-could be explained in physical, not metaphysical, terms. This did not keep people from originating religious theories or reshaping old ones.
Those religions which had no eschatology of resurrection or immortality in the Western sense, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Taoism were discredited. Those which did have such, Judaism, Islamism, Christianity, were equally discredited. But here, as on Earth, the death of a major religion was the birth pang of a new one. And there were, of course, minorities who refused stubbornly, despite all evidence, to admit that their faith was invalid.
Jill, standing near Samuelo, ex-rabbi, present bishop of the Church of the Second Chance, wondered what his reaction had been that first year on this world. There was no Messiah come to save the Chosen People, nor, indeed, any Chosen People assembled together at Jerusalem on Earth. No Jerusalem, no Earth.
Apparently the shattering of his faith had not shattered him. Somehow he had been able to accept that he had been wrong. Although a superorthodox rabbi of ancient times, he had a flexible mind.
At that moment Jeanne Jugan, who was hostess, offered Samuelo and Rahelo a dish of bamboo tips and fileted fish. Samuelo looked at the fish and said, "What is that?"
"Toadfish," Jeanne said.
Samuelo tightened his lips and shook his head. Jeanne looked puzzled, since the bishop was obviously hungry and his fingers were only a few centimeters from seizing the tips. These, as far as Jill knew, were not tabu according to the Mosaic laws. But they were on the same plate as the forbidden scaleless fish and so contaminated.
She smiled. It was much easier to change a person's religion than his/her food habits. A devout Jew or Moslem could give up his creed but would still feel nauseated if offered pork. A Hindu whom Jill had known had become an atheist on The Riverworld, but he still could not abide meat. Jill, though of partial blackfellow descent, could not force herself to eat worms, though she had tried. Genetic descent had nothing to do with dietary matters, of course; it was social descent that determined food choices. Though not always. Some people could adapt easily enough. And there was always the individual taste. Jill had ceased eating mutton the moment she had quit her parents' house. She hated it. And she preferred hamburger to beef roast.
The whole point to this reverie, she thought as she emerged from it, shedding thoughts as a surfacing diver sheds water, the whole point was that we are what we eat. And we eat what we do because of what we are. And what we are is determined partly by our environment and partly by our genetic makeup. All my family except myself loved mutton. A sister shared my indifference to beef roast and my love for hamburgers.
All my brothers and sisters, as far as I know, are heterosexual. I am the only bisexual. And I don't want that. I want to be one way or the other, a gate that is latched, not swinging either way depending upon which way the wind is blowing. My internal wind which shifts from east to west or vice versa, twirling the windcock this way, or that way.