That promise was broken within a month. Peter just could not hold fast to his convictions. In Allwood's parlance, he had "backslid," "fallen from grace."
Peter told Bob that his early religious conditioning and the passionate exhortations of the converts had been responsible for putting him in a fine frenzy of faith.
Allwood continued to argue with him, to "wrestle with his soul." Peter remained adamant.
Peter approached the age of sixty. His schoolmates and friends were dying off; he himself was not in good health. Death was no longer a long way off. When he was young, he had thought much about the billions who had preceded him, been born, suffered, laughed, loved, wept, and died. And he thought of the billions who would come after him, who would be hurt, be hated, be loved, and be gone. At the end of Earth, all, caveman and astronaut, would be dust and less than dust.
What did it all mean? Without immortality, it meant nothing.
There were people who said that life was the excuse for life, its only reason.
These were fools, self-deluded. No matter how intelligent they might be in other matters, they were fools -in this. Self-blinkered, emotional idiots.
On the other hand, why should human beings have another chance at an afterlife? They were such miserable, conniving, self-deceiving, hypocritical wretches. Even the best were. He knew no saints, though he admitted that there might have been and might be some. It seemed to him that only saints would be worthy of immortality. Even so, he doubted the claims of some of those who had been awarded halos.
Take Saint Augustine, for instance. "Asshole" was the only word that fitted him. A monster of ego and selfishness.
St. Francis was about as saintly as a person could be. But he was undoubtedly psychotic. Kissing a leper's sores to demonstrate humility, indeed!
Still, as Peter's wife had pointed out, no one was perfect.
Then there was Jesus, though there was no proof that he was a saint. In fact, it was evident from the New Testament that he had restricted salvation to the Jews. But they had rejected him. And so, St. Paul, finding that the Jews were not about to give up the religion for which they had fought so hard and suffered so much, had turned to the Gentiles. He made certain compromises, and Christianity, better named Paulism, was launched. But St. Paul was a sexual pervert, since total sexual abstinence was a perversion.
That made Jesus a pervert, too.
However, some people just did not have much sex drive. Perhaps Jesus and Paul had been such. Or they had sublimated their drive in something more important, their desire to have people see the Truth.
Buddha was perhaps a saint. Heir to a throne, to riches and power, married to a lovely princess who had borne him children, he had given all these up. The miseries and wretchedness of the poor, the stark unavoidability of death, had sent him wandering through India, seeking the Truth. And so he had founded Buddhism, eventually rejected by the very people, the Hindus, whom he had tried to help. His disciples had taken it elsewhere, however, and there it had thrived. Just as St. Paul had taken the teachings of Jesus from his native land and planted its seeds among foreigners.
The religions of Jesus, Paul, and Buddha had started to degenerate before their founders were cold in their graves. Just as St. Francis' order had begun corrupting before its founder's body was rotten.
48
On an afternoon while the Razzle Dazzle was sailing along, a good breeze behind its sails, Frigate told Nur el-Musafir these thoughts. They were sitting against the bulkhead of the forecastle, smoking cigars and looking idly at the people on the bank. The Frisco Kid was at the wheel, and the others were talking or playing chess.
"The trouble with you, Pete-one of the troubles-is you worry too much about other people's behavior. And you have too high ideals for them, ideals which you yourself don't try to live up to."
"I know I can't live up to them, so I make no pretense," Frigate said.
"But it bothers me that others claim to have these ideals and to be living up to them. If I point out that they aren't, they get angry."
The little Moor chuckled. "Naturally. Your criticism threatens their self-image. If that were to be destroyed, they, too, would be destroyed. At least, they think so."
"I know that," Frigate said. "That's why I quit doing that long ago. I learned on Earth to keep quiet about such matters. Besides, people got very angry and some even threatened violence. I can't stand anger or violence."
"Yet you are a very angry person. And I think your abhorrence of violence stems from fear of being violent yourself. You were- are-afraid that you'd hurt someone else. Which is why you suppressed that violence in yourself.
"But as a writer, you could express it. It would be done impersonally, as it were. You wouldn't be doing it in a face-to-face situation."
"I know all that."
"Then why haven't you done something about it?"
"I have. I tried various therapies, disciplines, and religions. Psychoanalysis, dianetics, scientology, Zen, transcendental meditation, Nichirenism, group therapy, Christian Science, and fundamental Christianity. And I was strongly tempted to become a Roman Catholic.''
"I never heard of most of those, of course," Nursaid. "Nor do I need to know what they were. The fault lies in yourself, regardless of the validity of these. By your own admission, you never stuck to any of them long. You didn't give them a chance."
"That," Frigate said, "was because, once in them, I could see their flaws. And I had a chance to study the people practicing them. Most of these religions and disciplines were having some beneficial effect on their practitioners. But hot nearly what was claimed for them. And the practitioners were fooling themselves about much of the benefits claimed."
"Besides, you didn't have the stick-to-itiveness needed," Nur said. "I think that comes from fear of being changed. You desire change, yet dread it. And the fear wins out."
"I know that, too," Frigate said.
"Yet you have done nothing to overcome that fear."
"Not nothing. A little."
"But not enough."
"Yes. However, as I got older, I did make some progress. And here I have made even more."
"But not nearly enough?"
"No."
"What good is self-knowledge if the will to act on it is lacking?"
"Not much," Frigate said.
"Then you must find a way to make your will to act overcome your will not to act."
Nur paused, smiling, his little black eyes bright.
"Of course, you will tell me you know all that. Next, you will ask me if I can show you the way. And I will reply that you must first be willing to let me show you the way. You are not as yet ready, though you think you are. And you may never be, which is a pity. You have potentiality."
"Everybody has potentiality."
Nur looked up at Frigate. "In a sense, yes. In another sense, no.''
"Mind explaining that?"
Nur rubbed his huge nose with a small, thin hand and then pitched his cigar across over the deck and over the railing. He picked up his bamboo flute and looked at it but laid it down.
"When the time comes, if it ever does."
He looked sideways at Frigate.
"You feel rejected? Yes. I know that you react too strongly to rejection. Which is one reason that you have always tried to avoid situations in which you might be rejected. Though why you should then have become a fiction writer is a mystery to me. Or is it? You did persist in your intended profession despite initial rejections. Though, according to your own story, you often let long periods of time elapse before you tried again. But you persisted.