Iimmi, who had now decided to take the bunk above Geo, came back a few minutes after mess. Geo had just awakened.
Geo laughed. “I found out what it was we saw on the beach that made us so dangerous.”
“How?” asked Iimmi. “When? What was it?”
“Same time you did,” Geo said. “I just looked. And then Snake explained the details of it to me later.”
“When?” Iimmi repeated.
“I just took a nap, and he went through the whole thing with me.”
“Then what was it you saw, we saw?”
“Well, first of all; do you remember what Jordde was before he was shipwrecked on Aptor?”
“Didn’t Argo say he was studying to be a priest. Old Argo, I mean.”
“Right,” said Geo. “Now, do you remember what my theory was about what we saw?”
“Did you have a theory?” Iimmi asked.
“About horror and pain making you receptive to whatever it was.”
“Oh, that,” Iimmi said. “I remember. Yes.”
“I was also right about that. Now add to all this some theory from Hama’s lecture on the double impulse of life. It wasn’t a thing we saw, it was a situation, or rather an experience we had. Also, it didn’t have to be on the beach. It could have happened anywhere. Man, and his constantly diametric motivations, is always trying to reconcile opposites. In fact, you can say that an action is a reconciliation of the duality of his motivation. Now, take all that we’ve been through, the confusion, the pain, the disorder; then reconcile that with the great order obvious in something like the sea, with its rhythm, its tides and waves, its overpowering calm, or the ordering of cells in a leaf, or a constellation of stars. If you can do it, something happens to you: you grow. You become a bigger person, able to understand, or reconcile, more.”
“All right,” said Iimmi.
“And that’s what we saw, or the experience we had when we looked at the beach from the ship this morning; chaos caught in order, the order defining chaos.”
“All right again,” Iimmi said. “And I’ll even assume that Jordde knew that the two impulses of this experience were one—something terrible and confused, like seeing ten men hacked to pieces by vampires, or seeing a film of a little boy getting his tongue pulled out, or coming through what we came through since we landed on Aptor; and two—something calm and ordered, like the beach and the sea. Now, why would he want to kill someone simply because they might have gone through what amounts, I guess, to the basic religious experience?”
“You picked just the right word,” Geo smiled. “Now, Jordde was a novice in the not too liberal religion of Argo. Jordde and Snake had been through nearly as much on Aptor as we had. And they survived. And they also emerged from that jungle of horror onto that great arcing rhythm of waves and sand. And they went through just what you and I and Argo went through. Little Argo, I mean. And it was just at that point when the blind priestesses of Argo made contact with Jordde. They did so by means of those vision screens we saw them with, which can receive sound and pictures from just about any place, but can also project, at least sound, to just about anywhere too. In other words, right in the middle of this religious, or mystic, or whatever you want to call it, experience, a voice materialized out of thin air that claimed to the voice of The Goddess. Have you any idea what this did to his mind?”
“I imagine it took all the real significance out of the whole thing,” Iimmi said. “It would for me.”
“It did,” said Geo. “Jordde wasn’t what you’d call stable before that. If anything, this made him more so. It also stopped his mental functioning from working in the normal way. And Snake who was reading his mind at the time, suddenly saw himself watching the terrifying sealing up process of an active and competent, if not healthy, mind. He saw it again in Urson. It’s apparently a pretty stiff thing to watch. That’s why he stopped reading Urson’s thoughts. The idea of stealing the jewels for himself was slowly eating away Urson’s balance, the understanding, the ability to reconcile disparities, like the incident with the blue lizard, things like that, all of which were signs we didn’t get. Snake contacted Hama by telepathy, almost accidentally. And Hama was something to hold onto for the boy.”
“Still, why did Jordde want to kill anybody who had experienced this, voice of God and all?”
“Because Jordde had by now managed to do what a static mind always does. The situation, the beach, the whole thing suddenly meant for him the revelation of a concrete God. Now, he knew that Snake had contacted something also, something which the blind priestesses told him was thoroughly evil, an enemy, a devil. On the raft, on the boat, he religiously tried to ‘convert’ Snake, till at last, in evangelical fury, he cut the boy’s tongue out with the electric generator and the hot wire which the blind priestesses had given him before he left. Why did he want to get rid of anybody who had seen his beach, a sacred place to him by now? One, because the devils were too strong and he didn’t want anybody else possessed by them; Snake had been too much trouble resisting conversion. And two, because he was jealous that someone else might have that moment of exaltation and hear the voice of The Goddess also.”
“In other words,” summarized Iimmi, “he thought what happened to him and Snake was something supernatural, actually connected with the beach itself, and didn’t want it
