“I could have produced documents from hospitals and doctors and insurance companies testifying for me.” She glanced him over, up and down, then, very interestedly, “It sounds as if you could have gotten out, Mr. Payerson.”
“Mayerson. I volunteered, Miss Hawthorne.” But I couldn’t have gotten out, not for long, he said to himself.
“They’re very religious in the colonies. So I hear, anyhow. What denomination are you, Mr. Mayerson?”
“Um,” he said, stuck.
“I think you’d better find out before we get there. They’ll ask you and expect you to attend services.” She added, “It’s primarily the use of that drug—you know. Can-D. It’s brought about a lot of conversions to the established churches… although many of the colonists find in the drug itself a religious experience that’s adequate for them. I have relatives on Mars; they write me so I know. I’m going to the Fineburg Crescent; where are you going?”
Up the creek, he thought. “The same,” he said, aloud.
“Possibly you and I’ll be in the same hovel,” Anne Hawthorne said, with a thoughtful expression on her precisely cut face. “I belong to the Reformed Branch of the NeoAmerican Church, the New Christian Church of the United States and Canada. Actually our roots are very old: in A.D. 300 our forefathers had bishops that attended a conference in France; we didn’t split off from the other churches as late as everyone thinks. So you can see we have Apostolic Succession.” She smiled at him in a solemn, friendly fashion.
“Honest,” Barney said. “I believe it. Whatever that is.”
“There’s a Neo-American mission church in the Fineburg Crescent and therefore a vicar, a priest; I expect to be able to take Holy Communion at least once a month. And confess twice a year, as we’re supposed to, as I’ve been doing on Terra. Our church has many sacraments… have you taken either of the two Greater Sacraments, Mr. Mayerson?”
“Uh—” he hesitated.
“Christ specified that we observe two sacraments,” Anne Hawthorne explained patiently. “Baptism—by water—and Holy Communion. The latter in memory of Him… it was inaugurated at the Last Supper.”
“Oh. You mean the bread and the wine.”
“You know how the eating of Can-D translates—as they call it—the partaker to another world. It’s secular, however, in that it’s temporary and only a physical world. The bread and the wine—”
“I’m sorry, Miss Hawthorne,” Barney said, “but I’m afraid I can’t believe in that, the body and blood business. It’s too mystical for me.” Too much based on unproved premises, he said to himself. But she was right; sacral religion had, because of Can-D, become common in the colony moons and planets, and he would be encountering it, as Anne said.
“Are you going to try Can-D?” Anne asked.
“Sure.”
Anne said, “You have faith in that. And yet you know that the Earth it takes you to isn’t the real one.”
“I don’t want to argue it,” he said. “It’s experienced as real; that’s all I know.”
“So are dreams.”
“But this is stronger,” he pointed out. “Clearer. And it’s done in—” He had started to say communion. “In company with others who really go along. So it can’t be entirely an illusion. Dreams are private; that’s the reason we identify them as illusion. But Perky Pat—”
“It would be interesting to know what the people who make the Perky Pat layouts think about it all,” Anne said reflectively.
“I can tell you. To them it’s just a business. As probably the manufacture of sacramental wine and wafers is to those who—”
“If you’re going to try Can-D,” Anne said, “and put your faith for a new life into it, can I induce you to try baptism and confirmation into the Neo-American Christian Church? So you could see if your faith deserves to be put into that, too? Or the First Revised Christian Church of Europe which of course also observes the two Greater Sacraments. Once you’ve participated in Holy Communion—”
“I can’t,” he said. I believe in Can-D, he said to himself, and, if necessary, Chew-Z. You can put your faith in something twenty-one centuries old; I’ll stick with something new. And that is that.
Anne said, “To be frank, Mr. Mayerson, I intend to try to convert as many colonists as possible away from Can-D to the traditional Christian practices; that’s the central reason I declined to put together a case that would exempt me from the draft.” She smiled at him, a lovely smile which, in spite of himself, warmed him. “Is that wrong? I’ll tell you frankly: I think the use of Can-D indicates a genuine hunger on the part of these people to find a return to what we in the Neo-American Church—”
“I think,” Barney said gently, “you should let these people alone.” And me, too, he thought. I’ve got enough troubles as it is; don’t add your religious fanaticism and make it worse. But she did not look like his idea of a religious fanatic, nor did she talk like one. He was puzzled. Where had she gotten such strong, steady convictions? He could imagine it existing in the colonies, where the need was so great, but she had acquired it on Earth.
Therefore the existence of Can-D, the experience of group translation, did not fully explain it. Maybe, he thought, it’s been the transition by gradual stages of Earth to the hell-like blasted wasteland which all of them could foresee—hell, experience!–that had done it; the hope of another life, on different terms, had been reawakened.
Myself, he thought, the individual I’ve been, Barney Mayerson of Earth, who worked for P. P. Layouts and lived in the renown conapt building with the unlikely low number 33, is dead. That person is finished, wiped out as if by a sponge.
Whether I like it or not I’ve been born again.
“Being a colonist on Mars,” he said, “isn’t going to be like living on Terra. Maybe when I get there—” He ceased; he had intended to say, Maybe I’ll be more interested in your dogmatic church. But as yet he could not honestly say that, even as a conjecture; he rebelled from an idea that was still foreign to his makeup. And yet—
“Go ahead,” Anne Hawthorne said. “Finish your sentence.”
“Talk to me again,” Barney said, “when I’ve lived down in the bottom of a hovel on an alien world for a while. When I’ve begun my new life, if you can call it a life, as a colonist.” His tone was bitter; it surprised him, the ferocity… it bordered on being anguish, he realized with shame.
Anne said placidly, “All right. I’ll be glad to.”
After that the two of them sat in silence; Barney read a homeopape and, beside him, Anne Hawthorne, the fanatic girl missionary to Mars, read a book. He peered at the title, and saw that it was Eric Lederman’s great text on colonial living, Pilgrim without Progress. God knew where she had gotten a copy; the UN had condemned it, made it incredibly difficult to obtain. And to read a copy of it here on a UN ship—it was a singular act of courage; he was impressed.
Glancing at her he realized that she was really overwhelmingly attractive to him, except that she was just a little too thin, wore no makeup, and had as much of her heavy dark hair as possible covered with a round, white, veil-like cap; she looked, he decided, as if she were dressed for a long journey which would end in church. Anyhow he liked her manner of speaking, her compassionate, modulated voice. Would he run into her again on Mars?
It came to him that he hoped so. In fact—was this improper?–he hoped even to find himself participating with her in the corporate act of taking Can-D.
Yes, he thought, it’s improper because I know what I intend, what the experience of translation with her would signify to me.