One of the bigger buildings in the labyrinth was evidently a school. He could hear the high, clear voices of children chanting mysterious hymns. The melodies were conventional seesaws of piety, but the words were strange:
Sweet treble voices, making the bizarre words sound all the more grotesque. Blood in my throat today. Unreal city. How can it exist? Where does the food come from? Where does the wine come from? What do they use for money? What do the people do with themselves all day? They have electricity: what fuel keeps the generator running? They have running water. Are they hooked into a public utility district’s pipelines, and if so why isn’t this place on my map? Fire in my soul today. Wine in my heart today. What are these feasts, who are these saints? This is the god who burns like fire. This is the god whose name is music. This is the god whose soul is wine. You were called, Mr. Oxenshuer. Can you say no? You can’t say no to our city. To our saint. To Jesus. Come along, now?
Where’s the way out of here?
Three times a day, the whole population of the city went on foot from their houses through the labyrinth to the dining hall. There appeared to be at least half a dozen ways of reaching the central plaza, but, though he studied the route carefully each time, Oxenshuer was unable to keep it straight in his mind. The food was simple and nourishing, and there was plenty of it. Wine flowed freely at every meal. Young boys and girls did the serving, jubilantly hauling huge platters of food from the kitchen; Oxenshuer had no idea who did the cooking, but he supposed the task would rotate among the women of the community. (The men had other chores. The city, Oxenshuer learned, had been built entirely by the freely contributed labor of its own inhabitants. Several new houses were under construction now. And there were irrigated fields beyond the mesas.) Seating in the dining hall was random at the long tables, but people generally seemed to come together in nuclear-family groupings. Oxenshuer met Matt’s two brothers, Jim and Ernie, both smaller men than Matt but powerfully built. Ernie gave Oxenshuer a hug, a quick, warm, impulsive gesture. “Brother,” he said. “Brother! Brother!”
The Speaker received Oxenshuer in the study of his residence on the plaza, a dark ground-floor room, the walls of which were covered to ceiling height with shelves of books. Most people here affected a casual hayseed manner, an easy drawling rural simplicity of speech that implied little interest in intellectual things, but the Speaker’s books ran heavily to abstruse philosophical and theological themes, and they looked as though they had all been read many times. Those books confirmed Oxenshuer’s first fragmentary impression of the Speaker: that this was a man of supple, well-stocked mind, sophisticated, complex. The Speaker offered Oxenshuer a cup of cool tart wine. They drank in silence. When he had nearly drained his cup, the old man calmly hurled the dregs to the glossy slate floor. “An offering to Dionysus,” he explained.
“But you’re Christians here,” said Oxenshuer.
“Yes, of course we’re Christians! But we have our own calendar of saints. We worship Jesus in the guise of Dionysus and Dionysus in the guise of Jesus. Others might call us pagans, I suppose. But where there’s Christ, is there not Christianity?” The Speaker laughed. “Are you a Christian, John?”
“I suppose. I was baptized. I was confirmed. I’ve taken communion. I’ve been to confession now and then.”
“You’re of the Roman faith?”
“More that faith than any other,” Oxenshuer said.
“You believe in God?”
“In an abstract way.”
“And in Jesus Christ?”
“I don’t know,” said Oxenshuer uncomfortably. “In a literal sense, no. I mean, I suppose there was a prophet in Palestine named Jesus, and the Romans nailed him up, but I’ve never taken the rest of the story too seriously. I can accept Jesus as a symbol, though. As a metaphor of love. God’s love.”
“A metaphor for all love,” the Speaker said. “The love of God for mankind. The love of mankind for God. The love of man and woman, the love of parent and child, the love of brother and brother, every kind of love there is. Jesus is love’s spirit. God is love. That’s what we believe here. Through communal ecstasies we are reminded of the new commandment He gave unto us, That ye love one another. And as it says in Romans, Love is the fulfilling of the law. We follow His teachings; therefore we are Christians.”
“Even though you worship Dionysus as a saint?”
“Especially so. We believe that in the divine madnesses of Dionysus we come closer to Him than other Christians are capable of coming. Through revelry, through singing, through the pleasures of the flesh, through ecstasy, through union with one another in body and in soul—through these we break out of our isolation and become one with Him. In the life to come we will all be one. But first we must live this life and share in the creation of love, which is Jesus, which is God. Our goal is to make all beings one with Jesus, so that we become droplets in the ocean of love which is God, giving up our individual selves.”
“This sounds Hindu to me, almost. Or Buddhist.”
“Jesus is Buddha. Buddha is Jesus.”
“Neither of them taught a religion of revelry.”
“Dionysus did. We make our own synthesis of spiritual commandments. And so we see no virtue in self-denial, since that is the contradiction of love. What is held to be virtue by others is sin to us. And vice versa, I would suppose.”
“What about the doctrine of the virgin birth? What about the virginity of Jesus himself? The whole notion of purity through restraint and asceticism?”
“Those concepts are not part of our belief, friend John.”
“But you do recognize the concept of sin?”
“The sins we deplore,” said the Speaker, “are such things as coldness, selfishness, aloofness, envy, maliciousness, all those things that hold one man apart from another. We punish the sinful by engulfing them in love. But we recognize no sins that arise out of love itself or out of excess of love. Since the world, especially the Christian world, finds our principles hateful and dangerous, we have chosen to withdraw from that world.”
“How long have you been out here?” Oxenshuer asked.
“Many years. No one bothers us. Few strangers come to us. You are the first in a very long time.”