Starrigger

enough to include us in the chitchat, explaining things as we went along. It turned out that John and his crew were a sect that had splintered off from the main church in Khadija, although terms like 'sect' and 'church' didn't quite seem to apply. Teleological

Pantheism sounded more and more like a framework within which one engaged in a freewheeling brand of theology rather than a body of dogma, and I gathered that the schism between John's group and the parent body was more personal than doctrinal.

I asked John to give me a definition of Teleological Pantheism in twenty-five words or less, fully granting that such an encapsulation would be grossly oversimplified and unfair.

'Well, I think I can,' John answered, 'and it wouldn't be too far off the mark.' He paused to compose, as if he were about to give birth to a rhyming couplet. 'Teleological Pantheists hold as an act of faith, unsupported by reason, that the universe has a purpose, and that there is a Plan to it all. I mean by 'act of faith' that it's a Kierkegaardian sort of leap, since there certainly is no empirical evidence to support such a belief.'

'Then, why believe it?' I asked. 'Sorry. Go on.'

'No, the question is valid, but I couldn't answer it in a paragraph, or even fifty. I'll certainly talk about it later, if you like. But anyway, that's the teleological part of it. The theistic part of it involves the notion that the universe is greater than the sum of its parts, that the totality of that which is ? reality, if you will ? is a manifestation of something beyond the plenum of sensory data we perceive it to be.' He stopped to regard the design of his rhetoric, and shook his head. 'No, that doesn't quite do it. All that does is allude to a fuzzy metaphysics. Shall we say this?' he went on, drumming the table with spidery fingers: 'We also accept on faith that there is some Unifying Principle to reality, of which natural laws are only signposts pointing in the direction of the heart of things.' He shifted his weight on the hardened foam floor. 'That's more or less it, but I think I should point out that the chief difference between us and almost any other religion that involves a deity is that we impose no structure on this Unifying Principle. We don't refer to it as God, or use any identifying tag, and we reject all anthropomorphic notions entirely. We hold that there is little we can know about the nature of this Principle, since it is always in a dynamic state, in a constant process of becoming, if you will, as the Universal Plan unfolds. We differ from classical deists in'that we can't imagine a state of affairs in which a creator slaps together a clockwork cosmos and then abandons it.' He took a sip of coffee. 'I think I went over twenty-five words.'

'John,' Roland said, 'you can't fart in less than twenty-five words.'

John led the laughter. 'I stand accused, and plead guilty, m'lord.' And with a furtive smile he added, 'But after all, to air is human.'

Groans.

'You could at least be original, John,' Roland chastised him. 'That was terrible, and I'd never forgive you, if it weren't for this flat you lent me,' he added, indicating the house.

Shudders.

'Besides punning,' Susan told us, by way of an apology for the punishment her compatriots were inflicting on us, 'Teelies love to talk. A good thing, too, because there's not much else to this religion.'

'Susan's right,' Roland said. 'We don't worship in the conventional sense. We have few ceremonies, nothing approaching a liturgy, and precious little in the way of doctrine. We believe that there must be a flux in these matters as well.'

'Thinking is worship,' John put in. 'So's talking about what you're thinking about. But not everybody thinks alike.'

'Yes, exactly,' Roland agreed. 'We want a religion stripped of every kind of dogmatic rigidity, hidebound orthodoxy, papal bulls, infallible preachings.. everything.'

'We reject revelation as a source of truth,' Susan said. 'More blood has been spilled over questions of whose holy book is, holier than over anything else in history.'

'People write books,' Roland said pointedly. 'Not gods.'

'Of course,' John said, 'there's much more. There are ethical currents flowing from the theological spring. We believe in cooperative living, for example. Granted, that's nothing new?'

'One thing we don't do is proselytize,' Susan broke in. 'We want to convert, if at all, by example or by a kind of osmotic process. Not by handing out pamphlets on street corners.'

'Sounds like my kind of religion,' I said finally. Actually, to me it sounded like Kant, Schopenhauer, and Hegel run through a protein synthesizer, spiked with a bit of mid-twentieth-century radical theology. 'Where do I sign up?'

'Right here,' John said, gesturing around us, 'and you do it by asking that question.'

I eased back against Darla's pack, uncrossed my legs, and put them under the table. 'Well, now, I don't think I'd take to communal living too well. I'm nasty in the morning and I raid the cooler at night. Generally, I'm an uncooperative son of a bitch.'

John gave me a sugary smile. 'But lovable in your own way, I'm sure. However, you don't have to live with other Teelies to be one.'

'Just as long as I drop my weekly tithe into the collection plate, eh?'

'No. Add to that list of 'don'ts' the fact that we don't tithe our membership.'

'Or take contributions from anybody,' Roland said, 'or solicit them.'

'Who pays the rent?' I asked, shocked. Maybe this was my kind of old-time religion.

'Our support mainly comes from the Schuyler Foundation, set up by an Australian multi-billionaire who was an early convert to TP. He read and was impressed with the writings of its originator, Ariel MacKenzie-Davies.' John stretched out on the floor, propping a head up on an elbow. 'She's an interesting figure. I'd give you a copy of her seminal work ? that is,' he said, his voice suddenly going hollow, 'if I hadn't been so careless as to leave my kit behind.'

That brought it all back, and the conversation died. I tried to resuscitate it.

'Besides,' I said, 'I'm not one for leaping, faithwise. I mean, I've tried to read Kierkegaard, but I usually wind up Soren logs.'

Only Susan, an American, got the joke. Her face brightened enough to register great pain. 'Really, Jake,' she scolded.

Roland was suspicious. 'Did I miss something?'

'Oh, my God,' John said. 'I just got it. Of course, sawing logs.'

Roland was mystified until John explained. Roland shook his head. 'Jake, sometimes your cultural allusions and a great deal of your vocabulary are very obscure. To me, at least. You're Nor'merican, of course, but what part?'

'Western Pennsylvania, old US of A. It's pretty isolated, and there's about a one-hundred-year culture-lag. Linguistic atrophy, too. Most of the colloquialisms are out of the mid-twentieth century, even earlier. It was my milk-tongue, and I'll probably never outgrow it.'

'But you seem an educated man.'

'That was out here, later on.'

'I see. Darla, you seem to have an accent I can't place. It sounds… well, mid-Colonial, for want of a better term.'

'My mother worked for the Colonial Authority for years,' Darla said, 'and dragged me around from planet to planet. She was Canadian, my father Dutch. So, it was alternately Dutch and English at home, Intersystem in school, and Portuguese, Tagalog, Bengali, Swedish, Afrikaans, Finnish?'

We all laughed. The usual language salad.

'Thank God for Intersystem and English,' John said. 'Otherwise we'd have Babel out here.' His face split into a yawn. 'And speaking of sawing logs…'

Everyone agreed. We cleaned up the supper mess quickly and made preparations for spending a cold night in a shell of a rundown shack in the middle of East Jesus. (There's one for Roland.)

But before we turned in, a talk with John was necessary.

'John, I should have said something before… but there's a price on my head. You and your people could be in danger.'

'I thought as much. The Colonial Authority?'

'Yes, them too, but that's the least of it.'

'I see.'