'Of course, if you do disagree with the Sturch or try to defy it, you do so because you are trying to realize a pseudofuture, one condemned by the Sturch. You, the individual, can't win.
'Yet, hear and listen to this: You also believe that you yourself have perfect free will to determine the future. But the future has been determined because Sigmen had gone ahead in time and arranged it. Sigmen's brother, Jude Changer, may temporarily disarrange the future and the past, but Sigmen will eventually restore the desired equilibrium.
'Let me ask and question you, how can you yourself determine the future when the future has been determined and forecast by Sigmen? One state or the other may be correct, but not both.'
'Well,' Hal said, his face hot, his chest feeling as if a heavy weight were on it, his hands shaking, 'I have thought of that very question.'
'Did you ask anyone?'
'No,' Hal said, feeling trapped. 'We were allowed to ask questions, of course, of our teachers. But that question was not on the list.'
'You mean to tell me that your questions were written out for you and you were confined to those?'
'Well, why not?' Hal said angrily. 'Those questions were for our benefit. The Sturch knew from long experience what questions students ask, so it listed them for the less bright.'
'Less bright is right,' said Fobo. 'And I suppose that any questions not on the list were considered too dangerous, too conducive to unrealistic thinking?'
Hal nodded miserably.
Fobo went on in his relentless dissection. Worse, far worse than anything he had said were his next words, for they were a personal attack on the sacrosanct self of Sigmen himself.
He said that the Forerunner's biographies and theological writings revealed him to an objective reader as a sexually frigid and woman-hating man with a Messiah complex and paranoid and schizophrenic tendencies which burst through his icy shell from time to time in religious-scientific frenzies and fantasies.
'Other men,' Fobo said, 'must have stamped their personalities and ideas upon their times. But Sigmen had and advantage over those great leaders who came before him. Because of Earth's rejuvenation serums, he lived long enough, not only to set up his kind of society, but also to consolidate it and weed out its weaknesses. He didn't die until the cement of his social form had hardened.'
'But the Forerunner didn't die,' Yarrow protested. 'He left in time. He is still with us, traveling down the fields of presentation, skipping here and there, now to the past, now to the future. Always, whereever he is needed to turn pseudotime into real time, he is there.'
'Ah, yes,' Fobo smiled. 'That was the reason you went to the ruins, was it not? To check up on a mural which hinted that the Ozagen humans had once been visited by a man from another star? You thought it might have been the Forerunner, didn't you?'
'I still think so,' said Hal. 'But my report showed that though the man resembled Sigmen somewhat, the evidence was too inconclusive. The Forerunner may or may not have visited this planet a thousand years ago.'
'Be that as it may, I maintain your theses are meaningless. You claim that his prophecies came true. I say, first, that they were ambiguously stated. Second, if they have been realized it is because your powerful state-church – which you economically term the Sturch – has made strenuous efforts to fulfill them.
'Furthermore, this pyramidal society of yours – this guardian-angel administration – where every twenty-five families have a gapt to supervise their most intimate and minute details, and every twenty-five family-gapts have a block-gapt at their head, and every fifty block-gapts are directed by a supervisor-gapt, and so on – this society is based on fear and ignorance and suppression.'
Hal, shaken, angered, shocked, would get up to leave. Fobo would call him back and ask him to disprove what he'd said. Hal would let loose a flood of wrath. Sometimes, when he had finished, he would be asked to sit down and continue the discussion. Sometimes, Fobo would lose his temper; they would shout and scream insults. Twice, they fought with fists; Hal got a bloody nose, and Fobo a black eye. Then the wog, weeping, would embrace Hal and ask for his forgiveness, and they would sit down and drink some more until their nerves were calmed.
Hal knew that he should not listen to Fobo, should not allow himself to be in a situation where he could hear such unrealism. But he could not stay away. And, though he hated Fobo for what he said, he derived a strange satisfaction and fascination from the relationship. He could not cut himself off from this being whose tongue cut and flayed him far more painfully than Pornsen's whip ever had.
He told Jeannette of these incidents. She encouraged him to tell them over and over again until he had talked away the stress and strain of grief and hate and doubt. Afterward, there was always love such as he had never thought possible. For the first time, he knew that man and woman could become one flesh. His wife and he had remained outside the circle of each other, but Jeannette knew the geometry that would take him in and the chemistry that would mix his substance with hers.
Always, too, there was the light and the drink. But they did not bother him. Unknown to her, she was now drinking a liquor almost entirely Easyglow. And he had gotten used to the light above their bed. It was one of her quirks. Fear of the dark wasn't behind it, because it was only while making love that she required that the lamp be left on. He didn't understand it. Perhaps she wanted to impress his image on her memory, always to have it if she ever lost him. If so, let her keep the light.
By its glow he explored her body with an interest that was part sexual and part anthropological. He was delighted and astonished at the many small differences between her and Terran women. There was a small appendage of skin on the roof of her mouth that might have been the rudiment of some organ whose function had been long ago cast aside by evolution. She had twenty-eight teeth; the wisdom teeth were missing. That might or might not have been a characteristic of her mother's people.
He suspected that she had either an extra set of pectoral muscles or else an extraordinarily well developed normal set. Her large and cone-shaped breasts did not sag. They were high and firm and pointed slightly upward: the ideal of feminine beauty so often portrayed through the ages by male sculptors and painters and so seldom existing in nature.
She was not only a pleasure to look at; she was pleasing to be with. At least once a week she would greet him with a new garment. She loved to sew; out of the materials he gave her she fashioned blouses, skirts, and even gowns. Along with the change in dress went new hairdos. She was ever new and ever beautiful, and she made him realize for the first time that a woman could be beautiful. Or perhaps she made him realize that a human being could be beautiful. And a thing of beauty was a joy, if not forever, then for a long time.
His enjoyment of her, and hers of him, was hastened and strengthened by her linguistic fluency. She seemed to have switched from her French to American almost overnight. Within a week she was speaking, within her limited but quickly increasing vocabulary, faster and more expressively than he.
However, his delight in her company made him neglect his duties. His progress in learning to read Siddo slowed down.
One day, Fobo asked him how he was doing with the books he'd loaned him. Hal confessed that they were too difficult for him – so far. Fobo then gave him a book on evolution which was used in the wog elementary schools.
'Try these. They're two volumes, but they're rather slim in text. The many pictures will enable you to grasp the text more quickly. It's an abridgement for the youngsters by a famous educator, We'enai.'
Jeannette had much more time to study than Hal, since she had little to do in the apartment while he was gone during the day. She tackled the new boob, and so Hal fell into the lazy habit of allowing her to translate for him. She would first read the Siddo aloud and then translate into American. Or, if her vocabulary failed her, into French.
One evening, she started out energetically enough. But she was sipping beetlejuice between paragraphs, and after a while she began to lose interest in the translating.
She went through the first chapter, which described the formation of the planet and the beginnings of life. In the second chapter, she yawned quite openly and looked at Hal, but he closed his eyes and pretended not to notice. So she read of the rise of the wogs from a prearthropod that had changed its mind and decided to become a chordate. We'enai made some heavy jests about the contrariness of the wogglebugs since that fateful day, and then took up, in the third chapter, the story of mammalian evolution on the other large continent of Ozagen which climaxed in man.
She quoted,' "But man, like us, had its mimical parasites. One was a different species of the so-called tavern beetle. It, instead of resembling a wog, looked like a man. Like its counterpart, it could fool no intelligent person, but its gift of alcohol made it very acceptable to man. It, too, accompanied its host from primitive times, became an integral part of his civilization, and, finally, according to one theory, a large cause of man's downfall.
' "Humanity's disappearance from the face of Ozagen is due not only to the tavern beetle, if it was at all. That creature can be controlled. Like most things, it can be abused or its purpose distorted so that it becomes a menace.
' "This is what man did with it.
' "He had, it must be noted, an ally to help him in the misuse of the insect. This was another parasite, one of a somewhat different kind; one that was, indeed, our cousin, in a manner speaking.
' "One thing, however, distinguishes it from us, and from man, and from any other animal on this planet with the exception of some very low species. That is, that from the very first fossil evidence we have of it, it was wholly– " '
Jeannette put the book down. 'I don't know the next word. Hal, do I have to read this? It's so boring.'
'No. Forget it. Read me one of those comics that you and the Gabriel's sailors like so much.'
She smiled, a beautiful sight, and she began reading Volume 1037, Book 56, The Adventures of Leif Magnus, Beloved Disciple of the Forerunner, When He Met the Horror from Arcturus.
He listened to her efforts to translate the American into the vernacular wog until he grew tired of the banalities of the comic and pulled her down to him.