Brother Paul looked behind him. They were actually in a hollow beside the clifflike face of a rocky ridge. Here was even more direct raw material; a moment ago it had seemed like a brick wall, and his companion—”

  Brother Paul turned to the man. “I am not certain I know you,” he said. Not in this world, anyway.

  His companion was a colonist he had not encountered in the village, a tall, thin, handsome young man, bronzed and healthy. “I am Lee, Church of Jesus Christ Latter-Day Saints,” he said. “I am one of the Watchers.”

  “Ah—Mormon,” Brother Paul said. “At one time I mistook you for—” He broke off, not wanting to mention the Fed narc. “But that’s irrelevant.”

  “Let’s move out before the rent in the Animation fills in,” Lee said. “We would not want to be trapped again.” He led the way, walking briskly. But in a moment he added: “What we experienced appears to be a hitherto unknown aspect of Animation. I was once called a member of your sect, though I really can not claim to know anything about your religion. I gather this was a reenactment of the experience that brought you into that Order.”

  “Yes,” Brother Paul agreed, surprised. “I was partially blind for several days, because, they said, I had stared into the sun too long. I think it was more subtle than that; my namesake the Apostle Paul was similarly blind after his conversion. Perhaps the drug and my general condition complicated it. The Holy Order of Vision took care of me, and treated me with the memory drug and kindness, phasing down the dosage of the one and phasing up the dosage of the other until I was stable again. I never did recover all my memories. But by then I knew my destiny. I have never regretted that decision.”

  Lee smiled, grasping the concept. “As the Apostle Paul joined the Christians he had persecuted—”

  “So I joined the Order I had wronged,” Brother Paul agreed. “In the process I became a Christian in the truest sense. I regret exceedingly that Sister Beth had to die in order to facilitate my conversion—”

  “I am sure you have filled her place admirably,” Lee said. “We can not know the meaning of God’s every act. We only know that there is meaning. Why did God allow the Apostle Paul to stone Stephen? Had I been there, I would surely have deemed Stephen a better spokesman for Christianity than a lame epileptic Pharisee Jew.” He smiled. “Which shows how little I would have known. Only God is omniscient.”

  “Amen,” Brother Paul agreed, discovering new insight. “The Apostle Paul made Christianity what it is, to a considerable extent. He opened it up to the gentiles. That seemingly minor though controversial change made all the difference.”

  “It did indeed,” Lee agreed. “Perhaps you also will benefit your sect and the world as the Apostle your namesake did.”

  “A ludicrous dream,” Brother Paul said. “Only God knows what an imperfect vessel I am. How much of my Animation did you share?” Brother Paul found that he liked this man, and hoped the horrors of his personal Animations had not been shown to him. Some secrets were best kept secret.

  “Just fragments of it, I think. A game called Tarot Accordion—I do not use cards for entertainment, but I do not pass judgment.” He paused. “Do all these episodes represent past experiences in your life or are some allegorical?”

  “Some are real; some are sheer fantasy,” Brother Paul said, embarrassed. If Lee had seen any of the nightmare visions, he was evidently too discreet to admit it.

  “I inquire,” Lee said with a certain diffidence, “because something very strange happened to me, and I wonder whether you might explain it. I felt—it was as though another personality impinged on me. An alien consciousness, not inimical, not unpleasant, but rather an exceedingly well informed mind from a distant sphere using my body and perceptions—”

  “Antares!” Brother Paul exclaimed.

  Lee looked at him, startled. “How did you know?”

  “I—cannot explain. But I met a creature from Sphere Antares. He said he might visit me here, or at least I wanted him to—” Brother Paul spread his hands. “A foolish expectation; I apologize.”

  “Foolish, perhaps. Yet it is an experience I seem to have shared. I don’t profess to understand it, but I do not regret it; the alien has a cosmopolitan view I rather envy.” He pointed ahead. “Look—there are the Watchers.”

  And there they were: Pastor Runford, Mrs. Ellend, and the Swami. “But where are the others?” Brother Paul asked. “The ones drawn into the Animations, as you were? We can’t leave them…”

  “No, we can’t,” Lee agreed as they came up to the Watchers. “Watchers, did you perceive the nature of the Animations we have experienced?”

  Pastor Runford shook his head. “We did not.”

  Brother Paul was relieved. “We have—seen things too complex to discuss at the moment. Several people remain. We need to get them out before—”

  Pastor Runford shook his head again, more emphatically. “We can not enter the Animation area. The young woman you call Amaranth went in to warn you about the storm, and—”

  “I understand,” Brother Paul said. “I’ll go back and find them.”

  “I, too,” the Swami said. “We had to retreat during the storm, but for the moment the effect seems to have abated.”

  Lee was already on the way. The three spread out, searching the landscape that had been a metropolis moments ago—and might be again if the Animation effect returned. Speed was essential.

  They found Therion first. He was sitting beneath a tree, looking tired. “That was some scene you folks cooked up,” he called.

  “I did not arrange it,” Lee protested. “I merely played roles assigned to me by the playwright. Some were diabolical—therefore I assumed they originated with you.” He did not smile.

  “I gather you two do not get along well,” Brother Paul said.

  “Few of us get along well with rival sects,” Lee admitted. “That is the problem of this colony. It is the same all over Planet Tarot; our village is typical. Everywhere we co-exist with ill-concealed distemper. This man is a devotee of the nefarious Horned God—whom I would call Satan.”

  “A Devil-worshiper!” Brother Paul exclaimed. “That explains a lot!”

  “The Horned God was great before any of your contemporary upstarts appeared,” Therion maintained, walking with them. “You call him Satan—but that is your ignorant vanity. He is a God—and perhaps the true God of Tarot.”

  “Sacrilege!” Lee cried. “The Prince of Evil!”

  “Listen, Mormon—your own sect is none too savory!” Therion snapped. “A whole religion based on a plagiarized fairy tale—”

  Lee whirled on him—but Brother Paul interposed himself. “Doesn’t your Covenant forbid open criticism of each other’s faiths?”

  “I never subscribed to that Covenant,” Therion said. “Anyway, I don’t find fault with all this hypocrite’s cult-tenets. Take this business of polygamy—that’s a pretty lusty notion. A man takes thirty, forty wives, screws them all in turn—that’s religion!”

  “I have no wives,” Lee said stiffly. “Because there aren’t enough girl-Mormons on this planet, and none free in this village.”

  “But if there were, you’d have them, wouldn’t you?”

  “The matter is academic,” Lee replied.

  “But if it were not—if you had the chance to wed just as many young, pretty, sexy, healthy women as was physically possible, how many would you take?”

  “One,” Lee said. “Plural marriage is an option, not a requirement. A single woman, were she the right one, would be worth more than a hundred wrong ones. I will marry the right one.”

  “You’re a hypocrite, all right,” Therion said. “I wish I could conjure a hundred wrong women and show you up for—”

  Further discussion was cut off by their discovery of Amaranth. She was standing by a streamlet, looking dazed. “Amaranth,” Brother Paul said, struck by her beauty, afresh, though of course he had now had opportunity to appreciate her charms unhampered by any clothing. (Or had he…?) It had once been said that clothes make the man, but it seemed more aptly said that clothes make the woman. “Come on out before the Animation effect returns.”

  She looked at him with evident perplexity. “I don’t know—don’t know my part. Am I still the fortune teller?”

  She was confused! “No,” Brother Paul said. “We are back in the mundane world. You have no role to play.”

  “She is always playing a role,” Therion muttered.

  “What’s this about roles?” the Swami asked.

  Lee answered him. “It was as though we were in a play, each with his script. Each person could ad-lib, but had to stay within the part. We do not know who the playwright was.”

  The Swami seemed intensely interested, despite his former cautions about Animation. “To whom did the scenes relate?”

  “Well, I seemed to be the central character,” Brother Paul said. “Perhaps the others had scenes to which they were central in my absence—”

  “No,” Amaranth said. “I played my roles only for you. Between roles I—seemed not to exist. Maybe I was sleeping. I thought I had died when I jumped from that copter—”

  Brother Paul was uneasy. “Perhaps we should not discuss it in the presence of those who were not involved.”

  “You must discuss it,” the Swami said, his gaze fixed. “You are searching for the God of Tarot, for the colonists of this planet.”

  “It seems I got distracted,” Brother Paul admitted.

  “I agree with Brother Paul,” Lee said. “We have experienced a remarkable joint vision whose implications may never be fully understood, just as the meaning of a person’s dream may never be clear. We should maintain our separate experiences, like the members of a jury, until we are ready to make a joint report.”

  “Yes,” Therion said.

  The Swami looked from one to the other. “The Devil Worshiper and the Righteous Saint agree?”

  “And so do I,” Amaranth said. “No one not in it can understand it.”

  “An extraordinary unanimity,” the Swami commented. “But I may have an insight. Is it not possible that the power of Kundalini—”

  “Remember the Covenant,” Therion reminded him gently. Yes, it was evident that these people had little patience with each other’s philosophies! Therion had said he did not subscribe to the Covenant and had called Lee a hypocrite. It was becoming clear who the actual hypocrite was.

  “I have not forgotten it!” the Swami said with understandable irritation. “But this power, however it may be named—call it the magic of Satan if you prefer—may be the controlling force of your visions. Brother Paul has the strongest psychic presence of your group, so it seems the play orients on him.”

  “Aura,” Lee said. “He has aura.”

  “This is uncertain,” Brother Paul said. “The reality of all we have experienced in Animation is speculative—”

  “No, I think he’s right,” Amaranth said. “There is something about you—”

  “We forget the child,” Therion said.

  “One of the Watchers is a child?” Brother Paul asked.

  “There was a child in the Animation, but I assumed she was a creature of imagination.” Those Dozens insults…

  “There were to be five Watchers,” Lee explained. “Two outside, and three inside the Animation, representing poles of belief. The child was the third inside.”

  “I will search for her!” the Swami said, alarmed.

  “We all will search, of course,” Lee said. “We have wasted time; the Animation may close in at any moment.”

  They spread out, striding through the valley. Therion was farthest to the left. Then Lee, then Brother Paul, then Amaranth, and the Swami on the right. There was no sign of the child.

  Therion and Lee drifted further left as the slope of the land changed; he could hear them exchanging irate remarks about each other’s religious practices, faintly. The Swami disappeared behind a ridge. This region was more varied than it had seemed to be before; the mists had tended to regularize the visible features in the distance. Brother Paul and Amaranth were funneled together by a narrowing gully. Here the trees were larger; the fire must have missed this section.

  It was dusk, and as the sun slowly lost its contest with the lay of the land the shadows deepened into darkness. Flashing insects appeared. They were not Earthly fireflies, but blue-glowing motes expanding suddenly into little white novas, then fading. In that nova stage they illuminated a cubic meter of space and were a real, if transient, aid to human navigation.

  “What are those?” Brother Paul inquired.

  “Nova-bugs. No one knows how they do it. Scientists shipped a few back to Earth, when they first surveyed this planet, but the lab experts said it was a mistake: the bugs possessed no means to glow. So—they don’t exist, officially. But we like them.”

  “Isn’t that just like an expert!” Brother Paul exclaimed. “He can’t explain it, so he denies it.” Yet this was true of people generally, not only experts. “Do you catch them and use them for lamps as the people used to do with fireflies?”

  “We tried, but they won’t glow when prisoned,” she said. “They tend to stay away from the village, too. This is an unusually fine display; some nights they don’t show at all.”

  “Smart bugs,” Brother Paul said. Obviously if the novas performed when tamed, there would soon be no wild ones left.

  “You know,” Amaranth said somewhat diffidently, “I was caught in the—the play accidentally. I was only coming to warn you of the approach of the storm when you didn’t answer the intercom. Then—”

  “I understand. You were not an assigned Watcher. I’m sorry you got trapped.”

  “That’s what I wanted to say, now that I’ve got you alone. I’m not sorry it happened. I got to show off my own Tarot deck in spite of the Covenant, and my fortunetelling skills—”

  “I believe you have omitted some material between those two,” Brother Paul said dryly. “I must apologize for—”

  “No, don’t apologize! I wasn’t fooling when I said there’s something about you, aura or whatever. Was it during the Animation that I said that? Anyway, I meant it. I have to study you to learn how you tamed the Breaker, but that’s become more of an excuse than—well, you’re quite a guy, in and out of Animation.”

  “I should hate to think that all those scenes were under my control,” Brother Paul said. “Some were all right—”

  “Like Sister Beth,” she agreed. “I am not of your religion, but after that I wonder whether—”

  “But others—well, that one in the castle.” He was forcing himself to clarify the worst. “Did I rape you?” As though it were a casual matter!

  “You never touched me,” she assured him. “More’s the pity. You can’t rape a willing woman.”

  Never touched her… That was worse yet. “Still, if it was my will that dictated your participation—”

  “I improvised some. It was my role to tempt you, and I tried, I really tried, but Therion kept getting in the way. I like to dress and undress. I like men—well, not men like that stuffed shirt Lee or the fake Swami, but men with guts and drives and—”

  “Fake Swami?”

  “He’s not Indian. I mean not Indian Indian. He’s American Indian. So all this talk about Kundalini—”

  “His origin doesn’t matter,” Brother Paul said, conscious again of his own mixed ancestry. “If he sincerely believes in his religion—and I’m sure he does—”

  “He’s still a fake,” she said.

  “He’s not a fake! He showed me the force he has—”

  “How did we get on this subject?” she inquired, turning to him. “Let’s kiss, and see where we can go from there.”

  Brother Paul was taken aback. Freed from the limits of her Animation roles, she was fully as forward. “Are you always this direct?”

  “Well, yes. Haven’t you noticed the way I dress? I’ve got the physical assets, and I want it known before I get old and saggy and lose my chance in life. But I don’t turn on to many men like this. I’ll admit there aren’t many eligible men in this village, maybe not on this planet. Most are like that old bore Siltz, dull and married and guarding his son’s virginity like an angry crocodile.” Suddenly it was clear to Brother Paul what her real irritation with Siltz was: his withholding of an eligible young male from the matrimonial market. There were evidently a number of such families here so that young men and women could not find each other. “The religious factor complicates it so terribly—but even so, you’re special. There’s something about you—maybe it is the aura the Swami talks about. The way you handled the Breaker! I mean to seduce you, if it’s not against your religion, and maybe you’ll like it well enough to want more. Once I have you hooked I’ll see about landing you permanently. Is trial sex against your religion? I can be more subtle if it is absolutely necessary.”

  “Well, the Holy Order of Vision does not specifically prohibit—it’s regarded as part of our private lives. But there is a certain expectation—well, as Sister Beth said—”

  Amaranth sighed. “She was a nice girl. Not like me. Was there really such a woman in your past?”

  “There really was,” Brother Paul agreed. “She was not as pretty as you, but the guilt of her death changed my life. I wish that change had been possible without such a sacrifice—but I always come back to the fact that I can not pretend to comprehend the will of God.”

  “That’s what the Jehovah’s Witnesses say when someone chides them about the end of the world not arriving on schedule. ‘Don’t second-guess Jehovah!’ I think it’s a copout. My religion is I.A.O., and no priestess of Abraxas is afraid of serpents, literal or figurative, or the opinion of a sexist God. So if you ever change your mind, I do give samples.”

  There was something at once horrifying and refreshing about her candor. It helped to know exactly where one stood. “Maybe Abraxas will turn out to be the God of Tarot,” Brother Paul said. This conversation made him nervous, because Amaranth was simply too attractive, in Animation and in life. More trying was that she had seen him in his elemental being, as a lust-laden male, as a fringe-legal gambler, as a drug addict. She had smelled the shit. She had seen the mask stripped from what he once had been, now hidden behind the facade of a gentle religion—and she did not condemn him. Was there another woman in the human sphere who, perceiving his psychic nakedness, the filth of his essence, would not recoil? He had no present intention of indulging her offer—yet he obviously had not felt that way in Animation! Which was his true mind?