nonetheless. We've gone beyond that here.'
'Beyond it to what?' Eleanor said.
'Oh, dear,' Dr. Wilburforce said a trifle uncomfortably. 'That's a very complicated question.' His eyes wandered over the room and paused for a moment, fixed on a point over my head, and I suddenly knew that someone was standing in the corridor behind us, looking in through the partially closed door. I stifled a paranoid urge to turn around. Dr. Wilburforce picked up a large briar pipe and polished its bowl on the side of his nose.
'Very complicated indeed,' he continued, backing off from his answer, 'and I'm not sure it can be compressed to good effect in a short newspaper story. Do you mind if I smoke?'
'Without getting into the fine points of doctrine,' Eleanor said, leaning forward, 'can you explain the difference between the Congregation and the Church of the Eternal Moment? And, no, we don't.'
Dr. Wilburforce lit up and blew plumes of bluish smoke through his nostrils. The pipe made a wet bubbling sound as he sucked at it, and his eyes once again flicked toward the door behind me 'I could, of course,' he said. 'I could. Good heavens, of course I could. Who if not me, eh?' He gave a tense little chuckle, exhaling fumes that smelled of burning cherries. 'Well, well. I hope you won't mind if I ask you: what is the general slant of your story?'
'We've heard rumors,' Eleanor said, repeating word for word the line I'd given her, 'of improprieties in the Church of the Eternal Moment.'
'Improprieties.' Wreathed in his fruity smoke, Dr. Wilburforce tasted the word like a sommelier trapped between a substandard wine and a smart customer. 'Spiritual improprieties?' he said cautiously.
'Financial,' Eleanor said.
Relaxation seeped through Dr. Wilburforce's outsize frame. His fingers groped toward each other and met again over his stomach like five overweight pairs of illicit lovers on safe ground at last. He actually sighed. 'I'm not surprised,' he said gravely around his pipe. 'Not at all.'
'But there is a relationship, isn't there, between your church and theirs?' Eleanor said.
'We make no secret of the fact. Man is descended, or rather ascended, as science tells us, from the apes. But science doesn't suggest that men are apes. We of the Congregation are ascended from the Church of the Eternal Moment in the same sense that Protestantism is ascended from the Romish church. Although,' he added hastily, 'I mean no disrespect to the Church of Rome, should either of you belong to it.'
Eleanor, a Taoist to her toenails, surmounted the slur with a brave smile that put Wilburforce in her debt. 'No offense,' she said, 'although I can't speak for Algy.'
'I'm okay,' I said. 'I used to be a choir boy, but it finally cleared up.'
'The Whore of Babylon,' Dr. Wilburforce said loudly. Eleanor sat up, looking startled. 'What is more important, I ask you, souls or profit? Yes, we share some points of doctrine with the Church of the Eternal Moment. Yes, we believe in the early Revealings and in the value of Listening. Yes, we believe that man's potential is infinite if he can clear away the clutter of his past. Or hers, of course,' he amended mechanically for Eleanor's benefit. 'We, too, concentrate our efforts on solving the problems of this world, this life, rather than wandering aimlessly around in the vast slough of time and space that we call the Cosmos.' He pronounced the word with a pedantic pleasure, as though other people insisted on calling it something else. Satisfied with the sound of it, he drew vehemently on his pipe and coughed, his face turning a pulse-pounding shade of purple. 'But do we speculate in real estate?' he said, blinking back tears. 'We do not. Do we invest the donations of our faithful in pork-belly futures and other commodities and money-market funds? We do not. Do we go on television and mewl and puke of poverty for hours on end in order to bleed little old ladies of their food stamps? We most certainly do not. Do we put our tax-exempt dollars into an automobile dealership in Downey or a miniature-golf course in Reseda? Most emphatically we do not.'
'A miniature-golf course?' I said. 'Reseda?'
'Excuse me for asking, Dr. Wilburforce,' Eleanor said pleasantly, 'but how much of this is sour grapes?'
'My dear Miss Chan, what an extraordinary question. Ha, ha, ha,' Wilburforce laughed, pronouncing each syllable separately and precisely, as though he were trying out a phrase in a language he didn't speak. 'Sour grapes indeed. No, Hubert Wilburforce is not perfect. He too can succumb to temptation. Until he was cleansed by the process of Listening he grasped as greedily at the plums of the world as the next man. Like everyone else, he wanted a bigger piece of the pie.' Eleanor winced. 'Perhaps he's been fortunate that the temptations he's encountered recently have been relatively small ones, unlike those that are now, even now, distorting and perverting the Church of the Eternal Moment.' He bit down hard enough on the stem of his pipe to crack it. Pulling it out quickly, he looked at it in dismay. Outside, the rain began to pour down in a serious fashion.
Eleanor glanced at me for a cue. 'Let's start at the beginning,' I said. 'When and why did you break off from the Church?'
'When? Ten years ago.' He drew experimentally at the pipe and looked over my head again. 'And why?' I turned and saw Sister Zachary failing to duck out of sight in time. 'Because the Church changed.'
'Can you be a little more specific?' Eleanor said, writing something on her pad.
'It became a business,' Wilburforce said distastefully. 'When Alon stopped speaking through Anna, the Church was at a crossroad, so to speak. It was actually a moment of opportunity, had it been grasped. The leadership could have devoted itself to the study of the Revealings. It could have refined the Listening process, as we have, and worked to help its members to achieve their potential. That was all that Alon had ever wanted. Instead, the old leadership frittered and sputtered until a new leadership arose, spreading hysteria through the Church, demanding that a new Speaker stand forth. Suggestible little girls were examined for the ability to Speak, as though it were something physical, like acne.'
'Or a cleft palate,' I said.
'Anna did not have a cleft palate.' Wilburforce puffed angrily on his damaged pipe. 'She had a mild speech impediment, but there was no trouble distinguishing between her T's and her L's. What happened was that the second little girl got the name wrong and they had to stick with it. It became Aton. And it became nonsense.'
'So the second Speaker was a fake?' Eleanor asked. 'And the new one too?'
'Um,' Dr. Wilburforce said, focusing over my head to meet the eyes of Sister Zachary, who'd evidently returned to the doorway. 'I don't want this to degenerate into name-calling and finger-pointing. I'm sure the little girls are perfectly sincere. Many of the charismatic religions depend on spontaneous utterances to shape their doctrines. In the Salem witch trials, if you remember your history, there was no shortage of witnesses to condemn those poor harmless old ladies. Most of the witnesses were young girls. I'm sure they believed their testimony when they gave it. Young girls are particularly susceptible to that kind of hysterical reaction.' He gave a hollow, slightly uneasy chuckle. 'Remember the Beatles,' he said.
'So the Church created Speakers?' Eleanor was writing busily in her pad as she asked the question.
'Intentionally, you mean?' Dr Wilburforce said, his discomfort increasing visibly. 'No, no, no, no, you mustn't quote me as having said anything like that. The leadership of the Church probably believed that a new Speaker would arise. And they obviously believed they needed one. All I'm suggesting is that their, um, their very eagerness created a climate in which it was probably inevitable that one or more of the young faithful would begin to spout Revealings. Poor dear, it wasn't her fault that she got Alon's name wrong.'
'Let me boil this down,' Eleanor said. 'You're saying that the leaders of the Church of the Eternal Moment created a climate, presumably twice, that would make little girls start to Speak, and that they then exploited those little girls to pull more revenue from the congregation, which they invested for sheer profit.'
The door creaked open behind me and I turned to see Sister Zachary waddle into the room. 'Don't put words in Dr. Wilburforce's mouth,' she said sharply. 'He said nothing of the kind.' Dr. Wilburforce hastily retreated from the conversation and sucked at his pipe, focusing all his attention on its bowl. 'You're the one who came in here talking about financial improprieties,' Sister Zachary continued implacably. 'Dr. Wilburforce has never alleged that the Church is involved in anything illegal. He's simply suggested that they are more interested in matters of funding than we are.'
'There are libel laws,' Dr. Wilburforce said weakly. 'The Church is litigious in the extreme. As we've learned.'
'Pipe down, you,' Sister Zachary said. 'I told you not to give this interview.'
'Wait,' I said. 'Miss Chan and I are doing a piece on the Church of the Eternal Moment, not on your Congregation. We're not trying to cause trouble for you. Dr. Wilburforce can be completely candid with us without worrying about the consequences. If he wishes, if you wish, we'll treat this interview as deep background. We won't
