again if I sang with them.' He hummed a few bars of the hymn. 'On Earth is not His e-qual—'
'Girding their loins for the good fight,' said the woman. She chuckled quietly for a moment. In a ribald tone that seemed barely to conceal heartbreak, she snapped, 'Do you care to fall in with the ranks of the Almighty? Or may it be with the Lord of Nothing, Old Angra Mainyu of the sixteen plagues? Pick your sides in the divine sweepstakes! It's for you they do it and of a great love for the soul in you.'
'They want you black and they want you white—'How in blazes do you know who's right?'
'It seems clear,' said Colt doubtfully.
'You think so?' she exploded. 'You think so now? Wait and see—with them tearing at your heart two ways and you sure that it'll never hold out but it's going to rip in half, and it never doing that but you going on through the night thirteen thousand meters above the world and never a soft bed and never a bite of real food and never a moment of closing your eyes and sleeping in darkness and night—!'
She collapsed, weeping, into his arms.
3
The long, starless night had not lifted. Three times more the voices had spoken from the heavens and silent lightning scribbled across the sky.
The two in-betweeners had chanted back and forth sacred writings of Asia, wretchedly seeking for answers:
'I will incline mine ears to a parable. I will open my dark sayings upon the harp. Wherefore should I fear in the days of evil when the iniquity of my heels shall compass me about?'
'O maker of the material world, thou holy one! When the good waters reach the left instep whereon does the Drukh Nasu rush?'
There was an explosion of cynical laughter above them, old and dry.
Grandfather T'ang greeted them, 'Be well, Valeska and Colt. And forget the insteps and the heels of the Upanishad. That is my counsel.' He upended the suntors bottle and flushed his throat with a half-pint of the stuff.
In reply to Colt's surprised glance she said, 'He often visits me. Gaw is a terrible old man who thinks nothing of lying and being untrue to himself.'
'A little of that would do you no harm, daughter. I belong out here with you, of course. But out here are no likely candidates for the dice box, and this ethereal gullet refuses to do without alcohol. Though this ethereal brain could do with considerably less of the pious nonsense that invariably accompanies winning at dice.'
He painfully squatted by them, keeping a death grip on the quart bottle.
'They're going to be at it again,' said the old man. 'It's just such a night as in August. Tooth and nail, hammer and tongs, no holds barred.' He spat on the rock. 'Pah! These spectacles disgust a man of my mentality.'
'You see?' asked the woman. 'He lies and cheats at dice. Yet often he sings with the worshipers. And always he says he spits on them in his mind. He is terrible!'
Colt quoted slowly, 'Judge me and my cause against the ungodly nation; O deliver me from the deceitful and the unjust man.'
'Ah?' asked Grandfather T'ang. 'Sacred books? Wisdom of the East? I join your symposium with the following, reverently excerpted from the Shuh King: 'The soil of the province was whitish and mellow. Its contribution of revenue was of the highest of the highest class, with some proportion of the second. Its fields were of the average of the second class.' ' He grinned savagely and drank deeply again.
'You can't be right,' said Colt. 'You can't be. There's something that forbids it being right to lie now that you're dead. It doesn't matter which side you choose—whether it's Raisuli's smiling idol or that thing the other side of the ridge. But you have to choose.'
'I'm different,' said rang smugly. 'I'm different, and I'm drunk two thirds of the time, so what's the difference if I'm different?' He began raucously to sing, beating time with the bottle, the one and only Confucian hymn:
'Superiority in a person
Should better not
Nor should it worsen.
It should consider everything
From pussycat to honored king.
Inferior people
Need a steeple
To climb and shout
Their views about.'
Colt drew a little aside with Valeska. 'Should this matter?' he asked.
'He really ought to choose one caravan or another. It's very wrong of him to pretend to be with one when he's really with neither. Either the Good or the Bad….' She stared quaintly into Colt's eyes. 'Do you think I'm bad?'
'No,' said Colt slowly. 'I know you're not. And you aren't good either.
Not by nature, practice or inclination. I'm the same as you. I want to sing their devil song and a Lutheran hymn at the same time. And it can't be done.'
'And you aren't a liar like that lovable old drunk rolling on the rocks there,' she said with a gesture. 'At least you aren't a liar.'
'I congratulate myself. I can appreciate it to the full. Have a drink, Valeska.'
'Yes. There is, you know, going to be a holy war. Which side should we be on?'
'Who knows? Let's take another look at the Bad boys.' There was half a pang of terror in his heart—a formless fear that he might find Badness less repugnant to him than Goodness. He knew the feeling: it was the trial of every human soul torn between one thing and another. Doubt was Hell—worse than Hell—and it had to be resolved, even at the risk of this magnificent creature by his side.
Silently he passed the bottle as the sky lightened and the silence spoke out of the heavens.
'As you wish,' she said. Colt felt a sort of opening in his mind, as though unspoken words had passed between them. He had heard her think in sorrow and fear of losing him.
She led him over a ridge to the long line of fires of the Bad caravan, fires blue-tipped before the ugly altar. There was a disemboweled sacrifice in its lap. Colt stared his fill, trying to probe what was in his own heart.
It was neither pleasure nor pain, neither pompous virtue nor cackling glee in destruction and death. There were techniques of self-searching now open to him that could never be those of a living man; he shuddered to think of how he had groped in darkness and ignorance before his death.
The caravan master, the squat monster in the mighty turban, greeted him warmly, 'We've been watching your progress with considerable interest, my son. We have felt that you were warming to our ideas. How do you feel about our community?'
Colt rolled back his consciousness into the dark recesses of his mind, exploring a new stock of knowledge— things that it seemed he must always have known, but never recognized till now for what they were.
'Community'— that meant the mutual practice of evil and destruction.
One of the tidbits of wisdom newly in his mind was an awareness that the Bad worked together, sealed in a union that bore death as its bond.
The Good practiced alone, rising very seldom to a community of any respectable proportions.
'May I enter the bond tentatively?' he asked.
The master looked pained. 'My son of abomination,' he said kindly, 'I'll have to ask you to be very careful. The balance is beautifully precise; it would be a shame to throw them out of kilter. But since you wish to go ahead, very well. Enter!'
Colt squatted on the ground with numerous others of the Bad people.
He sent out a consoling line of thought to Valeska, who stood somberly by, fearing to lose her solitary ally. He smiled a little and ran back a signal of reassurance.
He trembled a little with the effort, then threw back his mind like a door. The inverging flood of black, glistening
