Jack L. Chalker Priam's Lens

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the leap that seemed no problem for her.
He envied her that: the fact that she could so easily be
theologically inflexible while ignoring inconvenient commandments. The
social struc-ture of the family had evolved quickly because it was the most
efficient way to ensure its survival. Still, he won-dered how she got
around those little points like not cov-eting a neighbor's wife or
committing adultery when there was in fact no longer any sort of monogamous
marriage. There were a lot of little holes like that in her cosmology, but
nobody, least of all him, dared to bring them up.
He knew he was losing his faith, losing it in a kind of hemorrhage over the
past year or so, more slowly before that. It had all seemed so plain and
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simple when he had been instructed in the faith, when the gray-bearded Father
Petros had laid hands upon him and upon his oath or-dained him a priest of the
Holy Church. Father Petros, who had grown up under the old system, who had
been an archbishop when such a post had meaning.
Maybe Paulista was right. Maybe he was just thinking too damned much.
Every seven weeks, for just a few nights, both the moons of Helena vanished,
coming up only in daylight and, because of the distortions caused by the Titan
grid, virtually unseen. During that time, between two and five nights would
pass when neither moon appeared, and these had always been called Starnights.
These had had a special meaning for those of Helena, even in the old days: not
of fear, but of romance, and the renewal of faith and vows.
The Families who now were all that remained of that once proud civilization
still used them for the most impor-tant of rituals by which the Families
remained bound together. Boys became men, girls became women; sometimes, new
holy ones were ordained, and, at the very end, just before the first moon
rose, babies were baptized.
But the rule that only virgins could lie with virgins was absolute, and so one
thing came first, if any were ready. It didn't matter if it was the right time
for making babies or not, not the first time.
Littlefeet and Big Ears had both been postpubescent for several Starnights,
but until there were girls to match with them they were held in a no man's
land, not yet fully men, but able to undertake responsible tasks such as the
one Fa-ther Alex had sent them on to the rock. By the time of this
Stamight, that experience was long past, although never quite forgotten by
those involved in it. Still, because of the Family's constant movement through
the plain and grasslands, that place was now far away.
The instruction leading up to the confirmation of manhood was fairly
graphic and led by men who'd been through it recently themselves. Each had
to both relate to the neophytes on a level that would earn their trust, yet be
sufficiently bold and superior to make it something the younger ones would
want to do.
Father Alex and a few of his young acolytes watched but seldom interfered.
These sessions made him uncomfortable not the instruction in sex and sexual
technique, but the sodomy that was a part of it. Each time he couldn't
help but wonder if such practices, long associ-ated in religious
instruction with legendary Sodom and Gomorrah, the archetypes of
debauchery, were really nec-essary. Certainly they'd led to a male
hunter-gatherer--warrior subculture that thought it almost routine. The same
haremlike structure that protected the women had made the sexes view each
other almost as different species who united for only one purpose. This was
surely not, he thought, what
God had in mind, no matter what Mother Paulista had rationalized and now
enforced.
Littlefeet and Big Ears had been selected, he suspected, because he'd sent
them on that trip, not because they were any more due for this than half a
dozen other boys. All the instruction, all the prayer and fasting and then
the interactions, all the thoughts of pending status combined with fear of
what they had to do to get it and an even greater fear that they might not be
able to all consumed them and kept them from dwelling on the mystery of the
ghost in the mountain.
He and all the other men knew exactly what they were going through,
though. Because of the numbers there was no asceticism among priests in the
Family; everyone con-tributed to the gene pool even if they didn't
understand that this was what they were doing. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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